The English Department presents a lecture by Victorian literature specialist, Dan Novak on The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Given how often students and even scholars get the title of Oscar Wilde’s only novel wrong, it makes sense to ask why it is titled The Picture of Dorian Gray and not the Portrait of Dorian Gray. This lecture will propose that Wilde’s choice tells us something about Basil’s strange portrait and its equally strange and queer subject, about art in the age of photography, and even more broadly about the relationship between Victorian and Modernist aesthetics.