Oscar Wilde adds to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray a preface which embodied his aesthetic doctrine of “art for art's sake”. A preface is a text of literary criticism in which the poet brings his idea of art to surface in order to express his point of view on his art. The most important theme is Aestheticism which expresses a different concept of art compared to Romanticism. The romantic movement of the early and mid-nineteenth century viewed art as a product of the human creative impulse that could be used to learn more about humankind and the world. On the other hand Aestheticism doesn't accept Middle class morality and the sense of earnestness which dominated Victorian values.

The style is an epigrammatic one. The short statements seem to be suitable to stick in reader's mind and display a contradictory nature. We can notice lots of contradictory words “the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium” ; “when critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself” ; “a man for making a useful thing.. for making a useless thing..”. The artist is “the creator of beautiful things” and the critic “he who can translate into another manner or new material his impression of beautiful things”. Oscar Wilde condemns anyone who finds ugliness where there is Beauty as “corrupt”. The concept of Beauty is central in the idea of art, it was one of the key words in the romantic poetry of the second generation. The preface ends with the statement “All art is quite useless”.

To sum up the preface consists of a list of paradoxical and contradictory statements which challenge long-standing assumptions about art and the task of the artist, to reveal art.

Caliban is one of the characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He is the son of a witch and the only real native of the island in which arrive Prospero after the tempest.