Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks : A Portrait of Mind in the Making

Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks, which was originally published in 1989, was the first publication of Oscar Wilde's Notebook on History and Philosophy and his Commonplace Book, which he began to keep while a student at Oxford between 1874 and 1879, will forever alter critical perceptions of Wilde's intentions and achievements.Containing records of his education and reading - quotations and paraphrases of other writers and Wilde's own analytical and descriptive notes, comments, and fragmentary drafts - the notebooks show the intellectual influences he absorbed while in his early twenties.In a critical commentary the editors argue that from these sources Wilde developed a synthesis of Spencerian evolutionary theory and Hegelian philosophy that shaped his aesthetic and critical theories, his political ideals, and the themes of his most important fiction.Wilde's synthesis, the editors contend, incorporated the views of scientists and social scientists like T.H Huxley, Charles Darwin, W. K.