ABSTRACT
In a poignant moment of self-congratulation and self-torment, Oscar Wilde - prisoner of Reading Gaol - described himself as ‘a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age’. Wilde remarked in Pen, Pencil and Poison - his ‘study in green’ of the dandy, artist, critic, forger and serial-killer Thomas Griffiths Wainewright - that most artificial people have a great love of nature. The best example of Wilde putting into practice his aesthetic principles regarding the representation of the natural world is supplied by the opening paragraphs of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde toys with the distinction between Nature and Culture: acknowledging it only to collapse it. Wilde’s parodic engagement with other texts and other writers shows that he regards artistic originality as being as illusory and disabling as all others forms of authenticity.
