Oscar Wilde's brilliant play makes fun of the English upper classes with light-hearted satire and dazzling humour. It is 1890's England and two young gentlemen are being somewhat limited with the truth. To inject some excitement into their lives, Mr Worthing invents a brother, Earnest, as an excuse [...]

In "The Decay of Lying", Oscar Wilde uses his decadent ideology in an attempt to reverse and therefore reject his audiences' 'normal' conceptualizations of nature, art and morality. Wilde's views of life and art are illustrated through the use of Platonic dialogue where the character Vivian takes on[...]

This poem - originally published anonymously, written after Wilde's two year's hard labor in Reading prison - is the tale of a man who has been sentenced to hang for the murder of the woman he loved. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" follows the inmate through his final three weeks, as he stares at the s[...]

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. 'I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me ...Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day - mock me horribly!'. A story of evil, debauchery[...]

'He was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest...'. Wilde's supremely witty tale of dandies, anarchists and a murderous prophecy in London high society. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. L[...]

Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction and comedies of manners - the stories collected in this volume made Oscar Wilde's name as a writer of fiction, showing breathtaking dexterity in a wide range of literary styles. Victorian moral justice is comically inverted in 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime[...]

This is Wilde's masterful and wonderfully entertaining exploration of art and morality, in a chic new deluxe edition. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double l[...]

There has been a ghost in the house for three hundred years, and Lord Canterville's family have had enough of it. So Lord Canterville sells his grand old house to an American family. Mr Hiram B. Otis is happy to buy the house and the ghost - because of course Americans don't believe in ghosts. The C[...]

Few authors of the Victorian period were as immersed in classical learning as Oscar Wilde. Although famous now and during his lifetime as a wit, aesthete, and master epigrammist, Wilde distinguished himself early on as a talented classical scholar, studying at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford and w[...]

Wilde's short fiction includes such masterpieces as 'The Happy Prince', 'The Selfish Giant', 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' and 'The Canterville Ghost', as well as the daring narrative experiments of 'The Portrait of Mr. W. H.' and 'Poems in Prose'. This edition shows how they continue to the enthral [...]

Wit, dandy, literary anarchist, self-publicist, and homosexual martyr, Oscar Wilde achieved fame and notoriety at a time when mass culture and communication promoted the 'new' in every area of British life. This edition, part of Oxford's new Authors in Context series, examines the rich interplay bet[...]

One of a graded series of retold versions of popular classic and contemporary titles and specially written stories, The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde's comic masterpiece of love and mistaken identity. It first appeared on the stage in 1895 and has been hugely popular ever since.[...]