Oscar Wilde

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About Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford where, a disciple of Pater, he founded an aesthetic cult. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and his two sons were born in 1885 and 1886.
His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and social comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), established his reputation. In 1895, following his libel action against the Marquess of Queesberry, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and his confessional letter De Profundis (1905). On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900.
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Titles By Oscar Wilde
A wonderful book! —W. B. Yeats
While in one sense “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is as transparent as a medieval allegory and its structure as workmanlike as that of Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus”… in another sense it remains a puzzle: knotted, convoluted, brilliantly enigmatic. —Joyce Carol Oates
A story strange in conception, strong in interest, and fitted with a tragic and ghastly climax… A remarkable book. —Julian Hawthorne
Mr. Wilde’s work may fairly claim to go with that of Edgar Poe. —Walter Pater
This 2nd volume contains the following 50 works, arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names:
Jerome, Jerome K.: Three Men in a Boat
Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce, James: Ulysses
Kingsley, Charles: The Water-Babies
Kipling, Rudyard: Kim
La Fayette, Madame de: The Princess of Clèves
Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de: Dangerous Liaisons
Lawrence, D. H.: Sons and Lovers
Lawrence, D. H.: The Rainbow
Le Fanu, Sheridan: In a Glass Darkly
Lewis, Matthew Gregory: The Monk
Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street
London, Jack: The Call of the Wild
Lovecraft, H.P.: At the Mountains of Madness
Mann, Thomas: Royal Highness
Maugham, William Somerset: Of Human Bondage
Maupassant, Guy de: Bel-Ami
Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick
Poe, Edgar Allan: The Fall of the House of Usher
Proust, Marcel: Swann's Way
Radcliffe, Ann: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa
Sand, George: The Devil’s Pool
Scott, Walter: Ivanhoe
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Sienkiewicz, Henryk: Quo Vadis
Sinclair, May: Life and Death of Harriett Frean
Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle
Stendhal: The Red and the Black
Stendhal: The Chartreuse of Parma
Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy
Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island
Stoker, Bram: Dracula
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels
Tagore, Rabindranath: The Home and the World
Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace
Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina
Trollope, Anthony: The Way We Live Now
Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Verne, Jules: Journey to the Center of the Earth
Wallace, Lew: Ben-Hur
Wells, H. G.: The Time Machine
West, Rebecca: The Return of the Soldier
Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Xueqin, Cao: The Dream of the Red Chamber
Zola, Émile: Germinal
This edition has been professionally formatted and contains several tables of contents. The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.
The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
The History of Caliph Vathek - William Beckford
The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe
Caleb Williams - William Godwin
Wieland: or, The Transformation - Charles Brockden Brown
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Melmoth the Wanderer (Lock and Key Version) - Charles Robert Maturin
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
St. John's Eve - Nikolai Gogol
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
The Queen of Spades - Alexander Pushkin
Berenice - Edgar Allan Poe
Young Goodman Brown - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Nose - Nikolai Gogol
The Minister's Black Veil - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Ligeia - E. A. Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher - E. A. Poe
The Masque of the Red Death - E. A. Poe
The Oval Portrait - E. A. Poe
The Pit and the Pendulum - E. A. Poe
The Black Cat - E. A. Poe
The Tell-Tale Heart - E. A. Poe
Rappaccini's Daughter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Double - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Varney the Vampire - James Malcom Rymer
Villette - Charlotte Brontë
The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Uncle Silas - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Damned (Là-bas) - Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Trilby - George du Maurier
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Beetle - Richard Marsh
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
The Real Thing - Henry James
The House on the Borderland - William Hope Hodgson
The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
The Lair of the White Worm - Bram Stoker
The Outsider - Howard Phillips Lovecraft
From the play's effervescent beginnings in Algernon Moncrieff's London flat to its hilarious denouement in the drawing room of Jack Worthing's country manor in Hertfordshire, this comic masterpiece keeps audiences breathlessly anticipating a new bon mot or a fresh twist of plot moment to moment.
•AN AESTHETIC BOOK COVER
•A BEGINNING CLICK-ABLE TABLE OF CONTENT FOR ALL TITLES
•INNER CLICK-ABLE TABLES OF CONTENT FOR ALL INDIVIDUAL BOOKS WITH MULTIPLE CHAPTERS.
•NICELY FORMATTED CHAPTERS AND TEXT.
AUTHOR’S WORKS INCLUDE:
•COLLECTED POEMS
•VERA OR, THE NIHILISTS
•THE DUCHESS OF PADUA
•SALOMÉ (FRENCH VERSION)
•LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN
•A WOMAN
•SALOMÉ: A TRAGEDY IN ONE ACT
•AN IDEAL HUSBAND: A PLAY
•THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST: A TRIVIAL COMEDY FOR SERIOUS PEOPLE
•A FLORENTINE TRAGEDY
•LA SAINTE COURTISANE
•THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES
•A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES
•LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME
•THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W. H.
•THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
•INTENTIONS
•THE SOUL OF MAN
•DE PROFUNDIS
The central idea behind Wilde's reinterpretation of the Faust myth appeared several years before he began writing the novel, in the form of a spoken tale that the author would tell to friends, especially young admirers. Wilde was well aware of the story's debt to older tales of selling one's soul, youth, beauty, and power, freely admitting that it was a notion "that is old in the history of literature, but to which I have given a new form" (Drew xiv). This "new form" brings the idea of duplicity, of leading a double life, to the forefront of the tale, a theme that is much more dominant in Dorian Gray than it is in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus or Goethe's Faust, which is a typical characteristic of Wilde's work. This theme is explicitly explored, for instance, in the author's most celebrated play, The Importance of Being Earnest.
As Wilde's notoriety grew, mainly as a result of this novel's infamy, his enemies continued to use the homosexual undertones and seemingly immoral hedonistic values of Dorian Gray as an argument against his character. Such criticisms continued throughout his ruinous court appearances in 1895. At the time, any sort of homosexual act was a serious criminal offense in England. The first published version of the book from Lippincott's Monthly contained much more obvious allusions to physical love between Dorian and Lord Henry, and Dorian and Basil. Wilde had made a point of reducing these references in the revision, but the original version of the novel provided much fuel for his opponents' arguments.
After the trials, Wilde was briefly imprisoned, and his literary career never recovered. He moved to the European mainland and lived under an assumed name until his death, in a Paris hotel, in 1900. Wilde cited this novel as being primarily responsible for his ruin, speaking of "the note of Doom that like a purple thread runs through the cold cloth of Dorian Gray" (Drew xxvii). Only decades after Wilde's death would the work truly become respected as a literary masterpiece.
Despite the critical preoccupation with the book's seeming approval of alternative lifestyles, Dorian Gray is a novel that offers much more to both intellectual and artistically sensitive readers. It is primarily concerned with examining the complex relationships between life, art, beauty, and sin, while presenting a compellingly cynical portriat of high society life in Victorian-era London. It examines the role of art in social and personal life while warning against - despite Wilde's claims of artistic amorality - the dangers of unchecked vanity and superficiality.
'Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life'
The two works brought together here, 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Critic as Artist', are Oscar Wilde's wittiest and most profound writings on aesthetics, in which he proposes that criticism is the highest form of creation and that lying, the telling of a beautiful untruth, is the ultimate aim of art.
One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.
Originally published in the late 1880s and early 1890s, these tales predate Wilde's fame as a dramatist. When he wrote them, he was best known among fashionable London society as a drawing-room raconteur. Many of the character types now familiar from his comedies first emerged in these stories, along with his gifted uses of parody, melodrama, paradox, and irony. Even more significantly, they reflect the author's preoccupation with oppositesOCoidealistic love and desire, art and life, sincerity and artifice, innocence and sin, altruism and greed, and honesty and deceitOCooffering captivating expressions of the themes that dominated Wilde's life and thought.
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