The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde advocated passionately the main motto of the Aesthetic Movement, “art for art's soke“ and applied it to his works. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, especially in its preface, Oscar Wilde refined his ideas on the supremacy of art and presented an aesthetic literary manifesto. The novel was not only a brilliant example of an artistic defence of his aesthetic ideas, but also a brave critique of the morality of the Victorian age.