Oscar Wilde Books

In outraged reponse to Wilde accurately and profoundly depicting in his plays the corruption and obscenity of the British Empire's aristocracy, the Empire struck back by painting falsely and slanderously Wilde as a degenerate, a scapegoat sacrificed for its own sins. This book, written by his surviving son, with emendations and commentary and suggestions by his grandson, reveals the true Wilde, who early loved his sons and whose greatest and most painful loss in his pillorying by the Empire was his family. Wilde is not the painted savant fruit he is pictured, but a true family man, a true nationalist Irishman (to know Wilde, know his mother), and a truly gentle genius who strayed to near in playing court jester to the wrathful British throne.

To read this book is to hear once again the epic tale of sons in search of their lost father. In this case Telemachus never again sees Odysseus, who dies lost and weeping for his children on the bizarre islands of exile, and the aching yearning between father and son oozes gently from these pages like an embarrased fatal wound.

The greatest artistic work, and the most grecian tragic, as Wilde predicted, became his own life. To understand WIlde, please read this book. What wonders of literature this talented son might have produced, besides his remarkable translations from the French, etc., had this gifted family remained intact, and even at home with Lady Wilde in Dublin. Perhaps Wilde's second son would never have died for the Empire at war, perhaps with a purpose. But such musings lead to the despairing madness which ultimately tempted Oscar upon his early deathbed.

Essential for any and all student and reader of Mr. Wilde, for a truer and comprehensive understanding of this great writer. A universal legend of filial affection in its own right, as cross generational as any Garcia Marquez work, and beautifully written.

ThIs excellent collection of Irishman Mr. Wilde's most serious writings includes:

Soul of Man under Socialism - an interesting call for individualism of spirit under economic socialism, a resolution of his feelings for the Fabians

De Profundis- A letter to Bosie, a homnosexual young man whose father the powerful Marquess of Queensbury, had Wilde, previously a noted and dedicated family man who adored his children, imprisoned brutally on false charges. Reading Wilde's feelings of losing his children alone, for whom he wrote wonderful famous bedtime stories, wrenches the heart and gives a chance to grieve to half at least the fathers in America who have lost our children to unjust judicial action.

Letters from prison to newspapers

The Ballad of Reading Gaol- a great poem of life and death imprisoned, including how children are brutalized and all hope lost, a lesson for our current inhuman policy on Guantanamo where we imprison cruelly and torture innocent children not accused of any crime. Read tis peom aloud as you walk and you will see.

Not five years later Wilde died a broken man, the greatest of our Irish writers of his generation, in whose very popular plays exposed the profound corruption and petty cruelties of the English ruling class. He was through Bosie investigating for later dramatization the sexual perversity of the aristocracy, but was imprisoned lest he write his keen perceptions of those who brought so much suffering to the world and indulged their lives of hypocritical luxury

Fine reading. Food for thought. Healing for the heart under oppression.

It may seem wilful to lead a selection of Oscar Wilde's major critical prose with an essay on left-wing politics, but 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' is more concerned with aesthetics than ethics: Wilde found socialism 'beautiful' because it encouraged freedom and individualism, freeing man to develop his emotional and imaginative lives. Wilde's Utopian scheme, as he admits, is gloriously impractical and contrary to human nature, but that's the point - it's because reforms are based on what is considered practical, rather than what might be possible or even unthinkable, that inequality and suffering persist. His vision of a future in which men dream and absorb Art as vaguely-imagined machines do all the menial work, reads like a delightful lampoon of HG Wells. Favourite Quotation: 'the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman').

The selection begins with examples of Wilde the professional reviewer at work, attending art lectures by Whistler, reading books by Pater and Swinburne, drawing attention to poetry anthologies by labouring socialists, praising an actress's memoirs. Some of the pieces are more theoretical, arguing, for instance, the importance and legacy of actors as critics of great theatre. Each article presents difficult and often radical ideas in an accessible and witty manner. FQ: 'where there is no exagerration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding'.

'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.' (printed here in its extended 1889 revision) is quite simply one of the greatest achievements in the world literature of short fiction. 'Short story' doesn't begin to describe this work about a young scholar who commits suicide after being caught forging evidence to 'prove' a theory claiming that Shakespeare dedicated his Sonnets to a young actor-lover. 'Portrait' is mostly a dazzling exercise in critical play, but it is also a touching gay fantasy, a Nabokovian study of mad academics, a defence of 'forgery' as an aesthetic mode, a literary detective story, a history of the Elizabethan stage, an anthology of Elizabethan gossip, a Borgesian metaphysical puzzle and so much more. FQ: 'he always set an absurdly high value on personal appearance, and once read a paper before our Debating Society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good'.

'In Defence of Dorian Gray' collects letters written by Wilde to hostile newspapers that branded his only novel immoral, decadent and demanded its interdiction. While it's depressing to see our hero stoop to these tedious non-entities, we must remember the dangerous influence of the reactionary press, and at least the letters make galvanising reading, helping Wilde formulate ideas that would shape the novel's famous 'All art is quite useless' preface. FQ: 'Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination'.

But the major achievement here is the four-part collection 'Intentions', a still explosive series of critical dialogues, memoirs and essays which are only 'safe' today because they are labelled 'classic' - if anyone actually absorbed these radical, liberating pieces, with their provocative, teasing, shifting, playful, ironic, contradictory, unsystematic, aphoristic, hilarious assertions on Art, Beauty, Life, Philosophy, Morality, Ethics, Crime etc., the whole world would implode, or at least irrevocably change. 'The Decay of Lying' demolishes the depressing modes of realism and naturalism and the tyranny of facts; 'Pen, Pencil and Poison' is a portrait of Wainewright the Poisoner, Wilde discussing his crimes with the same aesthetic detachment as he does his art and writing; ''The Critic as Artist' is his masterpiece, a credo and a gauntlet; 'The Truth of Masks' is an essay on the importance of costume and historical accuracy when staging Shakespeare, and seems to contradict eveything else in the volume, with Wilde winningly admitting, 'Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay'. FQ: 'The truth of metaphysics are the truth of masks'.

There are (at least) two Wildes in this volume; one whose address is utterly contemporary and congenial, intellectually curious, blasting all that is deadening, hypocritical and humbug, an alien in his own time. The other is startlingly Victorian, passionately engaged with elitist subjects that have little importance or (ugh) 'relevance' today (Classical literature, Aesthetics, the importance of form etc.), couching his theories in language that is often ornate, oritund, exotic, even verbose, a lush challenge to his fusty, pedantic peers.

Linda Dowling's introduction rescues Wilde from his earnest post-modern apologists and returns him fruitfully to his original context, the Oxford debates about 'Art for Art's sake' and the function of poetry and criticism,. Her copious notes are a blessing and necessity, as well as recreating a strange, wonderful, intellectually audacious cultural world, one that shames our depleted, dead-end, theory-strangulated, accept-anything age. I know you've heard this before, but this time it's true: BUY THIS BOOK AND LET IT CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

This audio drama contains four short stories by great authors such as Henry James and Oscar Wilde. In my opinion, Wilde's Canterville Ghost is the best of the four. The special sound effect are both scary and humourous. Wilde's weird sense of humor about a British old ghost meets his match of an American family is perfectly interpreted in audio form by the producer of this audiobook.

A charming, philosophical fairy tale by Oscar Wilde about a baby boy found by a poor woodcutter in a bright and beautiful star. The woodcutter adopts the boy, who grows up extremely beautiful but also arrogant and cruel. He blinds and maims the animals of the forest, and shows no pity to those who where weakly or ill-favoured.

One day he cruelly turns away a beggar-woman, who is his mother, and his beauty is turned into ugliness. He begins a quest to find his mother to beg her forgiveness. Written for older children and the young of heart , in the fine prose of Oscar Wilde.

I can't believe I'm writing the first review for a book that is so important to the field of sexuality and queer theory. Ed Cohen has created one of the most comprehensive discussions that focuses on the origins of sexuality in Victorian England. By focusing on the development of masculinity and manliness in Victorian England as predicated by Victorian terms, Cohen developes an acute sense of what it meant to be a "man" in England during the late 19th century. Later in the book he developes, in the Foucaultnian tradition, the response by the judicial system, the press, and society to "unmanliness". The Wilde trials become the focus for his discussion on the dissemination of discursive language from literature and the media. If there is anything to obtain from this review it is that you cannot possibly understand Victorian sexuality without purchasing this book. It is worth so much more than it costs.

Teleny is a homoerotic novel and important antithesis to the prudish idealism of the neo-classic and neo-romantic lyric love poetry of the "fin de siècle". The book about the gay love between the rich Camille and the struggling, but sexy pianist Teleny was published in 1893 in 200 copies. The partially very graphic text is accompanied by tasteful erotic linocuts by Uday K. Dhar (New York).

As Ellmann writes in his magisterial biography, the name of Oscar Wilde is synonymous with delight. What better place to search for hitherto unreported aphorisms and bon mots than in the transcripts of his two trials--the one in which he sued the Marquis of Queensbery [my deliberate mispelling, to get back at this man for "somdomite"], Bosie's father, and the one in which he himself was accused of immorality? Since much of the interest in Wilde, as in Fitzgerald and Plath, is in his extraordinary life, this book should be a primary source.

If you feel as I do, you will not be disappointed with H., Montgomery Hyde's account. This is not a compilation of dazzling wit, yet wonderful ripostes break out amidst the legal tedium, the inexorable process that led to Wilde's imprisonment. The appendices and Hyde's comments add significantly and are remarkably free of editorializing.

A devoted reader of Ellmann's biography will immediately see that Ellmann relied on H. Montgomery Hyde. From a personal acquaintance who in the 1960's met Hyde at Northwestern University, where Ellmann taught, I have learned that the two knew each other well. Ellmann's conclusions about Wilde's syphilis derive in part from Hyde. His precis of the trial is a reduced version of Hyde's full presentation.

*The Trails of Oscar Wilde* brings the reader closer to Wilde (as seen by Hyde)--to the man whose force of personality gained him a devoted, usually sympathetic following. The personality is crucial. To Andre Gide, Wilde said, "I have put my talent into my work and my genius into my life [my translation]." Max Beerbohm, among others, claimed that Wilde's conversation was a supreme delight. W. H. Auden judged that except in his masterpiece *The Importance of Being Earnest* Wilde was primarily a performer, not an artist. This book brings the reader closer to that personality, that performer, made all the more moving by the reader's knowing, as the participants could not, what the consequences of his inquisition would be.

In honesty I must add that I read this book in a hardcover version published by William Hodge and Company in June 1948. I have not seen the Dover Books edition. Because it has the same title, it is doubtless the same as the one I know. It will be a treasure for the devotee.

Coates gives the reader the essentials in this "uncovered" edition. While I would have preferred an index, this collection serves as a wonderful primary source for the student of gay history, and a great read for anyone interested in Oscar Wilde or one of the earliest modern legal defenses of homosexuality. Despite surprising claims that the "love that dare not speak its name" defense is *not* a defense of homosexuality, even the most cursory read will show it is a brilliant defense of homosexual love in the classical (age-differentiated) sense, which was the very type of romantic/sexual relationship Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas had formed.

One of the stories that I will always cherish, that I remember being told in my youth, is this one. I've heard it many times : at home from my mother (saturday morning, in a low soft voice, in the kitchen, drinking soup), in the classroom from my teacher English Literature, at the university, and from my wife. So often we tell to each other, quiet but sad, with a dark smile : 'I have read all the wise men have written and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for the lack of a red rose my life is made wretched' (I don't know if it's quoted without mistakes). Everything we have is nothing compared to the love we lack, and even if we sacrifice a lot for it, it doesn't change but for a moment. The Nightingale, thinking she could solve it all by sacrificing herself, is pure tragic, and that gripped me most in the tale. I'm afraid I can't remember being told the Selfish Giant. I first heard it in the recent film 'Wilde'. Written for children, I think these tales are suitable for everyone who loves to laugh and cry without having too much troubles on their minds, and by learning a great deal about live through the eyes of Oscar Wilde. But are the eyes of Oscar Wilde those of the Selfish Giant or of the Nightingale ? One of the few questions that deserves no answer !