Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in Oscar Wilde Journalism

Abstract

The article reveals the specifics of the author’s view and creative position in the journalistic works of the famous Irish writer Oscar Wilde. The authors of the article found that he everywhere sought to capture the real world in its mobility and variability through his fleeting impressions. The impressionism of his works focused on the fluidity of the moment, the changeability of mood or a paradoxical angle of view. Wilde, the publicist, did not want to document the described reality. He recorded instantaneous changes in his perception, reproducing through images the impressions that were born in him at one time or another. Wilde’s world is a world of subjective, original impressions, it is decorative, excessively picturesque, but it is a world of deliberate and even invented impressions, and not spontaneously, impulsively born in the perception of the artist. The authors of the article believe that many of the writer’s thoughts and conclusions are relevant to the Russian society of the present time.