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The Viking Portable Library: Oscar Wilde

oscar wilde

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Includes the following works: Novels The Portrait of Dorian Gray ; Plays Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest ; Writings De Profundis, Critic as Artist, and Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Very Young; and selections from Lady Windermere's Fan , An Ideal Husband , and A Woman of No Importance . "

0 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1,1946

This edition

Format
0 pages, Hardcover
Published
June 11, 1986 by Random House Value Publishing
ISBN
9780517625798
ASIN
0517625792
Language
English

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About the author

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oscar wilde

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Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

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Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 18 votes)
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18 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
n00dleBOT
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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catching up on another of those classics that I missed out on somewhere along the way. Made me want to know more about Oscar's life after prison. Did he write anything worth remembering once he 'found humility'?
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1_Narumi_1
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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PLenty of Wilde to choose from in this handy volume - Dorian Grey, Importance of Being Earnest, Reading Gaol, etc.
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CrumbSteak
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Used this as a convenient way to read some Wilde I had missed out on. So the parts I read were:

The Picture of Dorian Gray
De Profundis
Ballad of Reading Gaol
and the letters from Wilde included in this volume (only about half a dozen)
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Profile Image for Kimberly .
Curiqus
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their
peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”

The amount of quotes I have highlighted within 741 pages is by no means enough. If I could highlight everything, I would.

I cannot tell you how many times I have read, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” for it is in my opinion one of the best stories ever told. And my Mother described his writing as “literary crème brûlée!” You will find no part of me in disagreement.

Yet, what struck me most was in “De Profundis” the end of his non-fictional letter to someone who betrayed him. To which it emotionally destroyed me in the best possible way. Sitting in public with my eyes closed just to feel it all. “I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain.
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sor-row, and its beauty.” For how often we look at what others teach us instead of what we teach us.
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uncieanki
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Most of this stuff was pretty silly, meager structures to hang witticisms on. The two exceptions were Salome, a very strange sort of dream, and De Profundis, a pained work of genius. Wilde's opus on the suffering of love, a force he can recognize, criticize, epigrammatize, yet cannot control, has to be the greatest thing he ever wrote.
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matchabread
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
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