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Ricevo solo risposte idiote. Lettere di amicizia e antipatia

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Scrittore, uomo di teatro, poeta, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) fu una delle presenze più dirompenti e controverse del panorama letterario e mondano del secondo Ottocento. Icona decadente e dandy per eccellenza, visse un'esistenza di scandali e trionfi. Nelle lettere ad amici, avversari e giornali ritroviamo le battute fulminanti e le godibilissime invettive che hanno reso leggendarie le sue conversazioni e le sue opere.

64 pages, Brossura con sovraccoperta

Published November 1, 2020

38 people want to read

About the author

Oscar Wilde

5,621 books39.1k 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 Benedetta Folcarelli.
163 reviews53 followers
Read
May 20, 2025
“Qual che sia il tuo scrittore preferito, dice tanto su di te”

Il mio scrittore preferito:
Profile Image for bri.
70 reviews
May 4, 2025
I know a diva when I see one
Profile Image for RICCARDO.
103 reviews1 follower
August 29, 2024
Sagace.
Un Wilde al contempo inedito e familiare.
70 reviews
October 18, 2025
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, meglio noto come Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) è il celebre esteta e autore de «Il ritratto di Dorian Gray» (unico romanzo, gli altri scritti sono opere teatrali, poesie, opere in prosa).

Brillante studente prima al Trinity College e poi a Oxford, fin da bambino comincia a dedicarsi alla scrittura. Nel 1881 pubblica la sua prima raccolta di poesie, considerata immorale e giudicata plagio di altri autori.
Viaggia molto, scrive molto, si dedica alle relazioni con vari intellettuali, amici, scrittori.
Sposato con Constance Lloyd, il matrimonio risulterà ben presto problematico, soprattutto per la conoscenza che Wilde fa di Robert Ross: giornalista canadese, cacciato da casa per via del suo orientamento sessuale. Robert e Oscar diventano amanti.

Tra alti e bassi, la carriera letteraria di Wilde continua: si dedica alla scrittura di articoli di giornali, opere teatrali come «L’importanza di chiamarsi Ernesto» e il celebre romanzo «Il ritratto di Dorian Gray», generatore di molte polemiche. Autore dalla penna vivace, dalle risposte brillanti, puntuali e sempre pronte.

All’apice del successo conosce Alfred Douglas. Comincia l’ennesima relazione amorosa che però questa volta non avrà un finale positivo: a Londra tutti sanno dell’omosessualità di Wilde, ma in quegli anni è considerato un reato. Il padre di Douglas, venuto a sapere della relazione tra il figlio e l’esteta, decide di accusare Wilde di sodomia. Oscar risponde con una causa per diffamazione, ma perde e viene condannato a due anni di lavori forzati e prigione. Questo è il periodo in cui scrive l’opera «De profundis», pubblicata postuma e indirizzata all’amato Alfred.

Attraverso le lettere conservate, circa 1585, possiamo ricostruire la personalità di questo singolare e brillante autore.
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