Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Oscar Wilde's chilling fable comes to new life With thirteen original and evocative B/W illustrations by John Murphy. "Eternal youth, infi nite passion, pleasures subtle and seccret, wild joys and wilder sins-he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame..." Such is the fateful wish of Dorian Gray, the young aristocrat who, enthralled by his own beauty, makes a Devil's Bargain: his portrait will age while he remains eternally young. Poisoned by the influence of the insidiously charming Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian makes the pursuit of new and sinful sensations his highest aim in life. As he tests Lord Henry's theories of Hedonism in the decadent underbelly of Victorian London, Dorian's good looks remain unblemished. His portrait must bear the burden of his sins.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Idylls Press
• Revised ed.
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. Dezember 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 312g
• ISBN-13: 9781595970152
• ISBN-10: 1595970150
• Artikelnr.: 25715041

Autorenporträt

Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for "gross indecency", imprisonment, and early death at age 46. Wilde's parents were successful Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising 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. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. 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). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote 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. Unperturbed, 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 The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men