LATE VICTORIAN INTERFERENCE OF GENRES: AESTHETICISM RESHAPING THE FAUST MYTH IN THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The theoretician of Aestheticism in English literature, Walter Pater, materializes the
principles and concepts of Aestheticism in his novel Marius the Epicurean. His
student and follower Oscar Wilde expresses the ideas of Aestheticism in his own
novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which also revives and rewrites the myth of Faust
with regard to the character representation strategies in the work. The present study,
on comparative grounds of analysis, attempts to reveal the ways in which Wilde’s
novel unites in one fictional discourse the principles of an artistic theory with those of
a literary myth in order to build a distinct world vision and provide a point of view
reified by both an aesthetic and a mythic context.