Morality as a Matter of Taste: The Fiction of Ronald Firbank

This article considers the fiction of the neglected early twentieth-century British novelist Ronald Firbank from the point of view of its relationship to the ethical aesthetics of Oscar Wilde as exemplified in his famous dictum that truth is a matter of style. The article argues that the highly stylised characteristics of Firbank's fiction that critical commentators have found most off-putting are the very characteristics that most fully and convincingly exemplify and express the subjective individualism that is the ideal of Wilde's late-Romantic ethical aesthetics.