Aestheticism In Oscar Wilde's The Turn Of The Screw

In the nineteenth century, the aestheticism movement changed the way art critics viewed and valued art. The aesthetes, the advocates of aestheticism, believed, roughly, that art is meant to be created and viewed for nothing by the sake of art itself. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a proponent of his movement towards the end of his life. The first portion of this two-part essay will convey Oscar Wilde’s views of aestheticism and the value of art. The second part will compare Wilde’s assessment of what art should be to Henry James’s (1843-1916) The Turn of the Screw.
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In his 1891 essay The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde debates that the criticism of art is an important and often underrated art form, and indeed, he contends to say that art-critics