Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Anglo-Irish playwright, poet and critic.  Wilde was a major critic in the Aesthetic Movement, both for his contemporaries and today for anyone interested in the ideas of the artistic avant-garde in the 1980s.  His learning was immense, acquired as a student of classics at Oxford University in the 1870s.  Travel also extended his cultural knowledge.  He returned from America with an enthusiasm for the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and from France with a love of Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry.

Varty, Anne. De Profundis: the ballad of Reading Gaol & other writings. Oscar Wilde, Wordsworth Classics, 2002, p. viii.

'I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.'

De Profundis

Library Resources
Web Resources

Library Resources

On the shelves

Plays

Literature

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Mighall. This Penguin Classic also includes the introduction to the First Classic edition by Peter Ackroyd
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray: an annotated, uncensored edited edited by Nicholas Frankel

Correspondence

  • De Profundis - Also includes The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Decay of lying, The Critic as an artist and The Soul of man under socialism

Biography

Criticism and interpretation

eBooks

From the Library's eBook collection

From Project Gutenberg

Study notes

Web Resources

Online Study Notes

General

Criticism and interpretation

Other sites of interest

  • Masters, Tim, 2016, 'Reading Prison to celebrate former inmate Oscar Wilde', BBC News, July 21.

Images

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