Dr Michèle Mendelssohn, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, is coming out with a new book that suggests Oscar Wilde plagiarized all his best epigrams and insights and was absolutely obsessed with the critical mind of Henry James:
One of the fascinating revelations of her book is quite how successful Wilde was at identifying himself with the Aesthetic movement. Her first illustration is of an American advert from 1882 which reads: "To be truly esthetic [sic] buy your ice cream and confections at JN Piercy's." Alongside this unlikely slogan is an image of Wilde, complete with floppy hair, cravat and velvet knee-length breeches. She points out that similar images of the author, who at the time had little literary output to his name, were used to sell hosiery, corsets, stoves and washing machines. Wilde had never endorsed such products and made no money from the adverts but, in an age long before today's celebrity-fuelled culture, he profited by association just as much as a Big Brother contestant will milk a career by hopping from one tabloid to the next. He had not invented Aestheticism, but he seemed to embody it, so much so that the illustrations that accompanied James's novel Washington Square show a languid, decadent character who looks like nobody so much as Wilde. This is all the more odd when you remember that James was by several years the older of the two, had been riding the Aesthetic bandwagon first and would go on to have a decidedly frosty relationship with a man he cattily described as a "fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad" and an "unclean beast".
The fashionable way of describing this is to say that Wilde poured his real genius into his life and not his art. He was a better self-promoter than he was a playwright, wit or critic. However, can that really be true? At the same time "The Importance of Being Earnest" was selling out at the St. James, Henry James' play "Guy Domville" was tanking across town. What does this tell us? Wilde may have stolen like a bandit, but he was still the best exponent of Aestheticism that ever lived. T.S. Eliot famously stole the term "Waste Land" from… well, from so many different people that it's almost impossible to divine the exact provenance of it. Martin Luther King plagiarized his doctoral dissertation whole-cloth. And does anyone remember — or care — about the scandal that almost scuppered Doris Kearns Goodwin's career before she published Team of Rivals and redeemed it forever? And a forgettable Nazi propagandist named Heinz von Lichberg wrote a story in 1916 about an older man who's obsessed with a young girl. The story was called "Lolita."
My sin, my soul. Big fucking deal.
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