ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel that first appeared in 1890, and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait", the short story originally published in 1842 as "Life in Death". Wilde's well-known storyline takes place in Victorian London and features the handsome Dorian Gray as the subject of a portrait painted by Basil Hallward who manages to capture the young man's beauty. Within the ideological framework that sustains Oscar Wilde's plot there appears to be no room for the kind of idealization of originals and authorship that plays such a defining role in Poe's story. For Poe, writing, and particularly the literary histrio's writing, also entails having total control over a reader, whose role is then reduced to that of a predictable, passive receptor and decoder of the author's conscious intentions. As Poe explains the "progressive steps" of his composition of "The Raven", he points out, for example, that "the initial consideration was that of extent.
