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Coleccion de Oscar Wilde

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A selection of writings from the pen of one of the wittiest men who ever lived, this compilation showcases Oscar Wilde's great writing and story-telling talent. The Oscar Wilde Collection features his very best work, bound in a deluxe hardcover slip-case edition. Selections include the philosophical/horror novel The Picture of Dorian Gray; the short story collections Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, the popular collection of Wilde's satirical fairy tales The Happy Prince & Other Stories, A House of Pomegranates, the classic comic ghost story The Canterville Ghost, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a poem written while Wilde was in exile following his release from prison. Throughout the book are beautiful black-and-white illustrations, including reproductions of the original edition's art for Wilde's fairy tales by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood.

The mark of a great writer is his relevance to subsequent generations of readers. Oscar Wilde is probably more popular now than he was in his lifetime and this compilation is the perfect introduction to his genius. The perfect addition to any Oscar Wilde or literature lover's shelf, this sturdy, full-color slip-case contains a gold-embossed hardback that creates a tasteful, elegant tribute to the genius that was Oscar Wilde.

641 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 13, 2011

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About the author

Oscar Wilde

6,164 books40.4k followers
Oscar 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.

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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Profile Image for John Peel.
Author 451 books171 followers
September 10, 2021
A select collection of his best-known works, this is an overview of his writings. Some are wonderful - "The Happy Prince", for example; some are cynical and many are simply over-written. The most notable is the famous "The Picture of Dorian Gray", which is a clever idea padded out by lots of Wilde's most noted epigrams. They're funny, but ruin the flow of the story.
Profile Image for Heather.
68 reviews
June 12, 2016
A book containing most of his greatest works; this is a must-have for any fan of classic literature or Oscar Wilde. It contains the most famous The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Canterville Ghost, The Model Millionaire, The Happy Prince and Other Stories, A House of Pomegranates, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I love Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray kept my attention. In Dorian Gray, we see the dangers of vanity and putting so much stock into someone else's ideals as your own. Dorian wishes that a portrait that his friend Basil made would grow old and he himself would stay young and handsome and he would never lose the approval of his peers. Well he gets his wish in the most horrific way--the portrait grows more grotesque the more he divulges into a life of immorality. He grows more and more fearful that someone would discover his sins when they look at the portrait.

The other stories are more like short stories, but they are no less amazing. My favorite one would be The Happy Prince. A swallow was migrating to where all his friends went and stopped to sleep under a statue of The Happy Prince. He died and his people immortalized him in a statue adorned with precious jewels. In this story, the swallow speaks with the Happy Prince who is sad at the suffering of his people and reluctantly agrees to help him. I wont spoil the ending but it was one of those endings with a bittersweet ending. Actually most of Oscar's short stories are bittersweet with a Christian ending to them. Oscar Wilde is easily my top favorite author and I recommend him to anyone and everyone.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews