Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Bilingual Edition: English-French

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only novel published by Oscar Wilde. It tells the story of a young man obsessed with his own youth and beauty, as expressed in a portrait done by Basil Hallward, and terrified to lose it. He innocently wishes that the portrait would age instead of himself. As he descends with his new friend Lord Henry Wotton into a life of sin and debauchery inconsistent with Victorian values, he discovers that this wish has come true. The portrait ages and bears evidence of his increasingly violent life, while Dorian himself remains unchanged. This bilingual edition of the classic gothic novel is designed to assist those learning French. The original English text appears on the left-hand pages of the book, with the corresponding French translation on the right-hand pages. Other bilingual books available from Sleeping Cat Books: Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe Fables of Jean de La Fontaine Candide Shakespeare's Sonnets New Fairy Tales for Small Children The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged) The Tales of Mother Goose The Last of the Mohicans Madame Bovary

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Sleeping Cat Books
• Seitenzahl: 372
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. November 2012
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 603g
• ISBN-13: 9780984679812
• ISBN-10: 0984679812
• Artikelnr.: 37782608

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