The Portable Oscar Wilde

by Wilde, Oscar (Author); Weintraub, Stanley (Editor); Aldington, Richard (Introduction by)

• ISBN13: 9780140150933
• ISBN10: 0140150935
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1981-07-01
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Summary

"I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction." Even as he celebrated the artificial and raised frivolity to an art form, Oscar Wilde was creating a new vocabulary of artistic expression-one that was witty and elegant and genuinely subversive in its assault on moral imperatives. In this marvelously inclusive anthology, Richard Aldington and Stanley Weintraub present the most quotable and influential of Wilde's writings. The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the plays Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest are included here in their entirety, along with the complete, unexpurgated text of the prison memoir De Profundis. In addition there are selections from the comedies Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband; reviews, poems, fairy tales that Wilde originally wrote for his children, the dialogue "The Critic as Artist," letters, and the sardonic manifesto "Pharases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young." Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(507)
Richard Aldington
Stanley Weintraub
Some Dates in the Life of Oscar Wilde
The Critic as Artist
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Salome
The Importance of Being Earnest
De Profundis	508	(151)
Poems, Poems in Prose, and a Fairy Tale	659	(37)
Helas!	659	(1)
from Ave Imperatrix	659	(1)
Requiescat	660	(1)
from The Burden of Itys	661	(1)
from Charmides	661	(3)
Symphony in Yellow	664	(1)
The Harlot's House	664	(1)
On the Sale by Auction of Keats' Love Letters	665	(1)
Portia: Written at the Lyceum Theatre	666	(1)
The Ballad of Reading Gaol	667	(23)
The Selfish Giant	690	(6)
Reviews	696	(7)
from A Bevy of Poets	696	(1)
from Pleasing and Prattling	697	(1)
from A ``Jolly'' Art Critic	698	(1)
from A Cheap Edition of a Great Man	699	(1)
from The Poets' Corner, III	699	(1)
from The Poets' Corner, V	700	(1)
from Poetry and Prison	701	(2)
Letters from Oscar Wilde	703	(30)
to Mrs George Lewis	703	(1)
to Mrs Bernard Beere	704	(3)
to Robert H. Sherard	707	(2)
to Constance Lloyd Wilde	709	(1)
to the Editor of the Scots Observer	709	(3)
to Bernard Shaw	712	(1)
to the Editor of The Times	712	(1)
to Grace Hawthorne	713	(1)
to Lord Alfred Douglas	714	(1)
to Robert Ross	715	(1)
to Lord Alfred Douglas	716	(2)
to the Home Secretary	718	(6)
to Carlos Blacker	724	(3)
to Reginald Turner	727	(1)
to Leonard Smithers	728	(2)
to Robert Ross	730	(3)
Wildean Wit from the Other Comedies	733	(6)
from Lady Windermere's Fan	733	(1)
from A Woman of No Importance	734	(3)
from An Ideal Husband	737	(2)
Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young	739