Selection includes "The Portrait of Mr W.H.", Wilde's defence of Dorian Gray, reviews, and the writings from "Intentions" (1891): "The Decay of Lying", "Pen, Pencil, Poison", and "The Critic as Artist". Wilde is familiar to us as the ironic critic behind the social comedies, as the creator of the be[...]
Wilde was both a glittering wordsmith and a social outsider. His drama emerges out of these two perhaps contradictory identities, combining epigrammatic brilliance and shrewd social observation. Includes "Lady Windermere's Fan", "Salome", "A Woman of No Importance", "An Ideal Husband", "A Florentine[...]
When the Selfish Giant builds a high wall round his lovely garden to keep the children out, the North Wind blows, the Frost comes and the Snow dances through the trees. The Giant wonders why Spring never comes to his cold, white garden. Then one day the Giant looks out to see a most wonderful sight.[...]
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 [...]
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 life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bear[...]
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 is a collection of stories, including two of Wilde's most famous: "The Canterville Ghost", in which a young American girl helps to free the tormented spirit that haunts an old English castle and "The Happy Prince", who was not as happy as he seemed. Often whimsical and sometimes sad, they all s[...]
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[...]
'I have nothing to declare', Wilde once told an American customs official, 'except my genius'. A socialite, a wit, a man who flaunted convention and was unafraid to shock, Oscar Wilde was a great writer and a great man. This new collection of wit and wisdom demonstrates the brilliance of his vision,[...]
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[...]
?Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides
?Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author's most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused a scandal when it ?rst appeare[...]
'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[...]
Oscar Wilde's tale of a Faustian pact in Victorian England, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is a both a slow-burning Gothic horror and a brilliant philosophical investigation of youth, beauty and desire. This "Penguin Classics" edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Mighall. Enthral[...]
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[...]
Part of "Penguin's" beautiful hardback "Clothbound Classics" series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian [...]
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[...]
The three stories in this book are about ordinary people, people like you and me; but they find themselves in surprising situations. Lord Arthur Savile, a rich man with no enemies, finds out that he must do something terrible before he can marry. Poor young Hughie Erskine gives money to an old begga[...]
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[...]
This edition collects and prints all of Oscar Wilde's short fiction, principally the three collections of tales published in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The first of these was The Happy Prince (1888), a volume which was aimed at the children's market, and which capitalized on the growing popular[...]
This is the first variorum edition of the 1890 and 1891 editions of Oscar Wilde's controversial novel, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. Drawing on manuscripts and a typescript, this volume reprints the thirteen-chapter and twenty-chapter versions of Wilde's narrative as separate works, enabling the rea[...]
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[...]
Packed with new evidence, Making Oscar Wilde tells the untold story of a local Irish eccentric who became a global cultural icon. This must-read book dramatizes Oscar Wilde's remarkable rise in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Michele Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history[...]
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 [...]
This volume of Keats's powerful poetry follows as closely as possible the chronological order of composition, highlighting autobiographical elements including the young Wilde's conflicting attitudes to Greece and Rome, pagan and Christian, and his fluctuating attraction to Roman Catholicism. The App[...]