Chapter I. The life of oscar wilde

CONCLUSION

To conclude, in the history of English literature and playwriting, in particular, only a few writers have skills like Oscar Wilde. Though morbidity has been mastered by Stephen King, he fails to get a hold on the rhetoric and eloquence that is a prominent feature of Wilde’s style. Similarly, Charles Dickens has the same eloquent style as that of Oscar Wilde. However, Oscar Wilde outshines him in imagery. The writing style of Oscar Wilde is a complete package, and no writer to date has been able to imitate his unique and slightly disturbing writing.
I think that rather than being a work written for an audience of prisoners, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem in which Wilde includes himself among them in order to become their mouthpiece of their feelings towards the bitter experiences of prison in front of a non-prisoner audience. The clearest proof of it is that Wilde himself insisted on having it published in a newspaper, so that it reached a wider audience. I argue that Gagnier's assertion that Wilde wrote De Profundis in the absence of an audience except for Lord Alfred Douglas is not exactly accurate. I believe that Wilde wrote it with a future audience in mind, because his instructions to his literary executor with respect to this letter make it evident that Wilde composed it as a document that would serve to explain his conduct towards the Queensberrys to the world. Still in prison Wilde asked Ross to make a copy of De Profundis before sending it to Douglas, arguing thus: Well, if you are my literary executor you must be in possession of the only document that really gives any explanation of my extraordinary behaviour with regard to Queensberry and Alfred Douglas Some day the truth will have to be known: not necessarily in my lifetime or in Douglas's: but I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into, for all time: for the simple reason that I inherited from my father and my mother a name of high distinction in literature and art, and I cannot, for eternity, allow that name to be the shield and catspaw of the Queensberrys.
However, it must be noted that the preoccupation with the reader is as old as the study of the text. For a historical perspective on the critical interest in reader's response in literary theory, see Tompkins and Selden.
It is necessary to bear in mind that, as Rabinowitz points out, "this hostility to New Criticism is common to most other contemporary theorists as well". A case in point in Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation", which illustrates the antagonistic attitude which was adopted against later New Criticism. Thus, what characterises reader-oriented criticism is not simply its opposition to the New Critical doctrine but more importantly its defence of the prominence of the role of the reader in the process of reading against its exclusion on the part of the New Critics.
Stanley Fish, who is the major exponent of American Reader-response theory, answers Wimsatt and Beardsley's charge of "affective fallacy" in the following terms: ... in the category of response I include not only "tears, prickles," and "other psychological symptoms" but all the precise mental operations involved in reading, including the formulation of complete thoughts, the performing (and regretting) of acts of judgment, the following and making of logical sequences.
The similarity between Booth and Gibson with regard to their conceptions of the reader and the reading process is explicitly pinpointed by Booth himself in his book. Hence, Booth comments that Gibson's work is "an excellent essay", and after praising it he goes on to make use of Gibson's notion of "mock reader" in order to illustrate some of his own practical examples.