Finger, Charles Joseph 1869-1941 creator Haldeman-Julius, E. (Emanuel) 1888-1951 text utu 2025 monographic en 1 online resource : multiple file formats "Oscar Wilde in outline" by Charles Joseph Finger is a critical study written in the early 20th century. It surveys Wilde’s life and writings—poetry, fiction, criticism, and especially drama—through the lens of his temperament, aesthetics, and reputation. The focus is on how Wilde’s paradoxes, influences, and public scandals shaped both his art and its reception, with the case made that his lasting strength lies in his plays and essays. The opening of this study argues that readers habitually confuse an artist’s work with the accidents of life, then places Wilde within that problem by briskly ranking his achievements across genres and noting how scandal has distorted judgment. Finger sketches Wilde’s “feminine” sensibility, heredity, love of display, and delight in contradiction, then defends the serious intent beneath his provocations—critiques of Puritan moralizing, American commercialism, and empty social ambition, and an insistence on self-culture and art’s independence from morality. He traces Wilde’s partisanship, especially his adoption of Baudelaire’s creed of “art for art’s sake,” and surveys the fiction: a sardonic take on Lord Arthur Savile’s tidy murder, and a mixed appraisal of The Picture of Dorian Gray—lavishly colored, French-influenced, and artificial yet memorable. Briefly, he treats the fairy tales as ornate fables for adults, before celebrating the plays’ glittering wit and stagecraft and noting the press’s hostility. The section then turns to Wilde as critic and essayist—sympathetic, stylish, influenced by Chuang Tzu—reading “Pen, Pencil and Poison” as a cool, psychological portrait rather than an ode to crime. Throughout, Finger quotes widely and compares deftly to argue that Wilde’s paradoxes mask a coherent plea for beauty, individuality, and the primacy of art. (This is an automatically generated summary.) Release date is 2025-12-18 Tim Miller, Terry Jeffress, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Originally published: Girard: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1923 Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900 -- Criticism and interpretation PR Girard: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1923 https://archive.org/details/oscarwildeinoutl442fing/mode/2up https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77494 https://archive.org/details/oscarwildeinoutl442fing/mode/2up https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77494 UtSlPG 260607 20260610134808.0 77494