Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray : A Self-Conscious Novel

This paper attempts to shed light on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)  and discuss the debatable issue of its genre: some critics see it as a Gothic novel while others suggest that it is a romance. The paper aims to investigate whether it is a self-conscious novel because a thorough reading and analysis of the text show that many of the elements of this genre are employed. A definition of the self-conscious novel is given to help determine the criteria required for the analysis. The novel is chosen for this study due to its importance in the history of the English novel. Also, it has been selected as the book of 2010 for Dublin City's ' One City, One Book Festival' in its fifth year. The paper concludes that it is a self-conscious novel, which gives it a unique position among the Victorian novels because this genre was not in vogue in the nineteenth century when realism was prominent in most works of art.