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Classic Tales of Oscar Wilde
This is a beautifully bound gift edition of these haunting and beautiful stories. And the Giant's heart melted as he looked out. 'How selfish I have been!' he said; '...I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever.' The five stories in his collection for children show Wilde at his best; moving, witty and wise. In "The Happy Prince", a grand but lonely statue recruits a swallow to help him give to people in need; In "The Nightingale and the Rose", a small bird makes a great sacrifice for love; "The Selfish Giant" is a beautiful story of the triumph of kindness; "The Devoted Friend" is a morality tale told to a pompous water rat; and "The Remarkable Rocket" charts the rise and fall of a particularly arrogant firework at a royal wedding.
96 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
68 people want to read
About the author
Oscar Wilde
5,509 books38.9k followersOscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging 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.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. 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). Wilde returned to drama, writing 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. Undiscouraged, 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 An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging 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.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. 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). Wilde returned to drama, writing 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. Undiscouraged, 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 An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 4, 2017
มีบางเรื่องที่เสียดสีสังคม แต่ไม่ใช่ทุกเรื่อง
บางเรื่อง มันคล้ายกับเป็นการบันทึกยุคสมัยเอาไว้มากกว่า
แล้วเรื่องที่เสียดสีสังคม
เราว่าเขาไม่ได้เสียดสีสังคมเอาสนุก หรือมันส์ปาก
แต่เหมือนเจ็บแค้นอะไรมา
ตัวละคร และสถานการณ์บางเรื่องฮาร์ดคอร์มาก
ในบางเรื่อง เขาชี้มุมมองความคิดนอกกรอบ
ทั้งกรอบของวัฒนธรรมประเพณี และศาสนา
ดูแหกคอกนิดๆ เหมือนเป็นเด็กแนวแห่งยุคสมัย
และเหมือนกับที่คนแปลบอก .. นี่มันไม่ใช่นิทานสำหรับเด็ก!
บางเรื่อง มันคล้ายกับเป็นการบันทึกยุคสมัยเอาไว้มากกว่า
แล้วเรื่องที่เสียดสีสังคม
เราว่าเขาไม่ได้เสียดสีสังคมเอาสนุก หรือมันส์ปาก
แต่เหมือนเจ็บแค้นอะไรมา
ตัวละคร และสถานการณ์บางเรื่องฮาร์ดคอร์มาก
ในบางเรื่อง เขาชี้มุมมองความคิดนอกกรอบ
ทั้งกรอบของวัฒนธรรมประเพณี และศาสนา
ดูแหกคอกนิดๆ เหมือนเป็นเด็กแนวแห่งยุคสมัย
และเหมือนกับที่คนแปลบอก .. นี่มันไม่ใช่นิทานสำหรับเด็ก!
May 29, 2017
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.'
Review coming soon.
.
Review coming soon.
.
April 4, 2021
The Selfish Giant is one of my all time favourite tales
December 20, 2016
Beautifully written tales on lessons of love, selflessness, and compassion. These stories are ingeniously crafted to bring the reader into the tale. My favorite story is "The Happy Princess" who gives everything he has to help the desperate citizens of his city who are in need the most.
December 20, 2017
This is an interesting, warped collection of fairy tales. I think they would be wasted on children. They're a bit twisted which makes them entertaining.
July 1, 2018
i felt my heart die along with the nightgale’s.. my god this book is beautiful.
January 28, 2022
Genuine genius. Imagery so vivid it shook me to the core of my being.
June 18, 2016
Fairy tales and Oscar Wilde - sounds like a perfect match. Dark, romantic, tragic, sickly comic, moralistic, aesthetic, fantastical, poetic. Wilde's catalogue of talents fits perfectly to the list of necessary fairy tale ingredients. And they are all present and accounted for. Unfortunately, most of these tales do not live up to their potential.
Wilde writes very traditional tales with his own twists. He personifies animals, but also statues, fireworks and plants. He follows the rules of fairy tale construction (there are lots of threes, lots of stock fairy tale characters (witches, princes, woodcutters) lots of lessons learned) but he adds a darker touch, a cynical side, of real tragedy. His language is flowery and fittingly fantastical, as well as often religious in tone and allegory. He takes these fairy tales very seriously, but there are moments of very Wildian humour and sly parody.
But for whatever reason, a lot of the stories fall flat. Perhaps he sticks too doggedly to the formula, perhaps his descriptions are too wordy, but they often get boring long before they end. They are also far more predictable than one would expect, even innovative stories like the arrogant rocket who doesn't light. They are also relentlessly sad. The story of the poor neighbor of the rich miller rams home its moral message early but offers no punishment for the immoral character, instead punishing the weaker poor man with an graceless death in the snow. The opening tale about a gold plated statue of a prince helping his poor subjects through the sacrifices of a swallow who pays for his goodness with death is deeply, symbolically romantic in a way that few other than Wilde can evoke, but its sadness leaves a hollow feeling and a bitter taste. Another in which a bird bleeds to death to aid a lover who is then rejected anyway has the same morbid romanticism, full of animal and floral imagery. Depending on the reader's mood they could be lovely or downright cruel.
The one's that work are excellent readers, in particular the longest story, 'The Fisherman and his Soul'. In the story of a fisherman who loves a mermaid and cuts out his soul to win her heart, Wilde's imagery is given space and time to flow into the realms of the fantastical. There are dramatic, awe-inspiring scenes packed with religious imagery, like the fisherman's close encounter with the devil and the final rising up of the sea and the Sea-folk to swallow up the doomed fisherman. In this epic, sweeping tale, Wilde's romantic vision of the fairy tale universe comes to bright fruition.
Perhaps the final tale, 'The Star-Child' sums up Wilde's vision. A very moralistic progress of a young changeling ends in happiness after he repents of his arrogance and vanity, suffers deeply and painfully and offers charity to the poor. His reward is a reunion with his lost parents and wealth and power as a prince. Yet Wilde can not stop at the Happily-ever-after. Almost as an afterthought he adds the tragic future and hammers the nail in by revealing that those who ruled after his young death did so evilly. Wilde roots out the true darkness of from the heart of fairy tales, mixes it up with his own breed of slightly Gothic romanticism, yet in some cases the combination ends up tasting bitter and uninteresting. 4
Wilde writes very traditional tales with his own twists. He personifies animals, but also statues, fireworks and plants. He follows the rules of fairy tale construction (there are lots of threes, lots of stock fairy tale characters (witches, princes, woodcutters) lots of lessons learned) but he adds a darker touch, a cynical side, of real tragedy. His language is flowery and fittingly fantastical, as well as often religious in tone and allegory. He takes these fairy tales very seriously, but there are moments of very Wildian humour and sly parody.
But for whatever reason, a lot of the stories fall flat. Perhaps he sticks too doggedly to the formula, perhaps his descriptions are too wordy, but they often get boring long before they end. They are also far more predictable than one would expect, even innovative stories like the arrogant rocket who doesn't light. They are also relentlessly sad. The story of the poor neighbor of the rich miller rams home its moral message early but offers no punishment for the immoral character, instead punishing the weaker poor man with an graceless death in the snow. The opening tale about a gold plated statue of a prince helping his poor subjects through the sacrifices of a swallow who pays for his goodness with death is deeply, symbolically romantic in a way that few other than Wilde can evoke, but its sadness leaves a hollow feeling and a bitter taste. Another in which a bird bleeds to death to aid a lover who is then rejected anyway has the same morbid romanticism, full of animal and floral imagery. Depending on the reader's mood they could be lovely or downright cruel.
The one's that work are excellent readers, in particular the longest story, 'The Fisherman and his Soul'. In the story of a fisherman who loves a mermaid and cuts out his soul to win her heart, Wilde's imagery is given space and time to flow into the realms of the fantastical. There are dramatic, awe-inspiring scenes packed with religious imagery, like the fisherman's close encounter with the devil and the final rising up of the sea and the Sea-folk to swallow up the doomed fisherman. In this epic, sweeping tale, Wilde's romantic vision of the fairy tale universe comes to bright fruition.
Perhaps the final tale, 'The Star-Child' sums up Wilde's vision. A very moralistic progress of a young changeling ends in happiness after he repents of his arrogance and vanity, suffers deeply and painfully and offers charity to the poor. His reward is a reunion with his lost parents and wealth and power as a prince. Yet Wilde can not stop at the Happily-ever-after. Almost as an afterthought he adds the tragic future and hammers the nail in by revealing that those who ruled after his young death did so evilly. Wilde roots out the true darkness of from the heart of fairy tales, mixes it up with his own breed of slightly Gothic romanticism, yet in some cases the combination ends up tasting bitter and uninteresting. 4
February 9, 2017
I really love The nightingale and the rose and The happy prince, but occasionally these stories smack you in the face with some religious propaganda and I try not to judge literature that is a product of it's time (I really liked water babies) but even I struggle when the preach is beyond peradventure.
September 10, 2012
This little volume surprised me. Lots of tongue-in-cheek humor and a bit of satire, but still very lovely and fun and perfect to be read aloud to kiddos.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews