Will Self’s “Garden of Unearthly Delights”: The Antihero and the City in Dorian: An Imitation

Abstract

Will Self's Dorian: An Imitation recasts the decadence and wit of Oscar Wilde's narrative as the full-blown excess of image-obsessed contemporary Britain riddled with drugs, AIDS, and terminal boredom. Brutal satire and imagery of death, war, disease, and destruction align the novel with the contemporary genre of transgressive fiction which has established a new satiric tradition. The aim of this article is to analyse Self's novel within that tradition by examining the antihero as the epitome of his age and the city as the transgressive locus terribilis.