Download or read book Making Oscar Wilde written by Michèle Mendelssohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Packed with new evidence, "Making Oscar Wilde" tells the untold story of a local Irish eccentric who became a global cultural icon. This must-read book dramatizes Oscar Wilde's remarkable rise in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Michele Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history to reveal a life like no other.
Download or read book Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture written by Joseph Bristow and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of this influential writer's reputation. In the years leading up to his two-year imprisonment, Wilde stood among the foremost dramatists in London. But after he was sent down for committing acts of "gross indecency" it seemed likely that social embarrassment would inflict irreparable damage to his legacy. He died in comparative obscurity. Little could he have realized that in five years his name would come back into popular circulation thanks to the success of Richard Strauss's opera Salomé and Robert Ross's edition of De Profundi. With each succeeding decade, the twentieth century continued to honor Wilde's name by keeping his plays in repertory, producing dramas about his life, adapting his works for film, and devising countless biographical and critical studies of his writings.
Download or read book Wilde in America Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity written by David M. Friedman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Oscar Wilde’s landmark 1882 American tour explains how this quotable literary eminence became famous for being famous. On January 3, 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old “genius”—at least by his own reckoning—arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made such a spectacle of himself in London with his eccentric fashion sense, acerbic wit, and extravagant passion for art and home design that Gilbert & Sullivan wrote an operetta lampooning him. He was hired to go to America to promote that work by presenting lectures on interior decorating. But Wilde had his own business plan. He would go to promote himself. And he did, traveling some 15,000 miles and visiting 150 American cities as he created a template for fame creation that still works today. Though Wilde was only the author of a self-published book of poems and an unproduced play, he presented himself as a “star,” taking the stage in satin breeches and a velvet coat with lace trim as he sang the praises of sconces and embroidered pillows—and himself. What Wilde so presciently understood is that fame could launch a career as well as cap one. David M. Friedman’s lively and often hilarious narrative whisks us across nineteenth-century America, from the mansions of Gilded Age Manhattan to roller-skating rinks in Indiana, from an opium den in San Francisco to the bottom of the Matchless silver mine in Colorado—then the richest on earth—where Wilde dined with twelve gobsmacked miners, later describing their feast to his friends in London as “First course: whiskey. Second course: whiskey. Third course: whiskey.” But, as Friedman shows, Wilde was no mere clown; he was a strategist. From his antics in London to his manipulation of the media—Wilde gave 100 interviews in America, more than anyone else in the world in 1882—he designed every move to increase his renown. There had been famous people before him, but Wilde was the first to become famous for being famous. Wilde in America is an enchanting tale of travel and transformation, comedy and capitalism—an unforgettable story that teaches us about our present as well as our past.
Download or read book The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde written by Joseph Pearce and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vilified by fellow Victorians for his sexuality and his dandyism, Oscar Wilde, the great poet, satirist and playwright, is hailed today, in some circles, as a progressive sexual liberator. But this image is not how Wilde saw himself. Joseph Pearce's biography strips away pretensions to show the real man, his aspirations and desires. It uncovers how he was broken by his prison sentence; it probes the deeper thinking behind masterpieces such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis; and it traces his fascination with Catholicism through to his eleventh-hour conversion. Pearce removes the masks and reveals the Wilde beneath the surface. He has written a profound, wide-ranging study with many original insights on a great literary figure.
Download or read book Oscar Wilde s Oxford Notebooks written by Oscar Wilde and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This, the first publication of Oscar Wilde's Commonplace Book and Notebook, which he kept during his middle twenties at the end of his studies at Oxford, will forever alter critical perceptions of Wilde's achievement in the larger tradition of English critical and aesthetic thought. Containing the records of his education and reading--quotations and paraphrases of other writers, and Wilde's own analytical and descriptive jottings, comments, and fragmentary drafts--these documents reveal how Wilde developed the synthesis of Hegelian idealism and Spencerian evolutionary theory that was to be a mainstay of his major critical and creative works. Not merely the dandy and aesthete of modernist myth, Wilde was also a precocious and widely-read Victorian humanist. In addition, the editors provide an introduction and commentary.
Download or read book Henry James Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture written by Michele Mendelssohn and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James's and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself.
Download or read book Declaring His Genius written by Roy Morris Jr. and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” But as Roy Morris, Jr., reveals in this sparkling narrative, Wilde was, for the first time in his life, underselling himself. A chronicle of the sensation that was Wilde’s eleven-month speaking tour of America, Declaring His Genius offers an indelible portrait of both Oscar Wilde and the Gilded Age. Wilde covered 15,000 miles, delivered 140 lectures, and met everyone who was anyone. Dressed in satin knee britches and black silk stockings, the long-haired apostle of the British Aesthetic Movement alternately shocked, entertained, and enlightened a spellbound nation. Harvard students attending one of his lectures sported Wildean costume, clutching sunflowers and affecting world-weary poses. Denver prostitutes enticed customers by crying: “We know what makes a cat wild, but what makes Oscar Wilde?” Whitman hoisted a glass to his health, while Ambrose Bierce denounced him as a fraud. Wilde helped alter the way post–Civil War Americans—still reeling from the most destructive conflict in their history—understood themselves. In an era that saw rapid technological changes, social upheaval, and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, he delivered a powerful anti-materialistic message about art and the need for beauty. Yet Wilde too was changed by his tour. Having conquered America, a savvier, more mature writer was ready to take on the rest of the world. Neither Wilde nor America would ever be the same.
Download or read book Oscar Wilde in America written by Oscar Wilde and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-01-06 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.
Download or read book Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man s Smile written by Gyles Brandreth and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playwright and raconteur Oscar Wilde embarks on another adventure as he sets sail for America in the 1880s on a roller coaster of a lecture tour. But the adventure doesn't truly begin until Oscar boards an ocean liner headed back across the Atlantic and joins a motley crew led by French impresario Edmond La Grange. As Oscar becomes entangled with the La Grange acting dynasty, he suspects that all is not as it seems. What begins with a curious death at sea soon escalates to a series of increasingly macabre tragedies once the troupe arrives in Paris to perform Hamlet. A strange air of indifference surrounds these seemingly random events, inciting Oscar to dig deeper, aided by his friends Robert Sherard and the divine Sarah Bernhardt. What he discovers is a horrifying secret -- one that may bring him closer to his own last chapter than anyone could have imagined. As intelligent as it is beguiling, this third installment in the richly historical mystery series is sure to captivate and entertain.
Download or read book Beautiful Untrue Things written by Gregory Mackie and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borrowing its title from Oscar Wilde's essay "The Decay of Lying," this study engages questions of fraudulent authorship in the literary afterlife of Oscar Wilde. The unique cultural moment of Wilde's early-twentieth-century afterlife, Gregory Mackie argues, afforded a space for marginal and transgressive forms of literary production that, ironically enough, Wilde himself would have endorsed. Beautiful Untrue Things recovers the careers of several forgers who successfully inhabited the persona of the Victorian era's most infamous homosexual and arguably its most successful dramatist. More broadly, this study tells a larger story about Oscar Wilde's continued cultural impact at a moment when he had fallen out of favour with the literary establishment. It probes the activities of a series of eccentric and often outrageous figures who inhabited Oscar Wilde's much-mythologized authorial persona - in forging him, they effectively wrote as Wilde - in order to argue that literary forgery can be reimagined as a form of performance. But to forge Wilde and generate "beautiful untrue things" in his name is not only an exercise in role-playing - it is also crucially a form of imaginative world-making, resembling what we describe today as fan fiction.
Download or read book Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast written by Oscar Wilde and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself' Wilde's celebrated witticisms on the dangers of sincerity, duplicitous biographers, the stupidity of the English - and his own genius. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.
Download or read book The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart written by R. Zamora Linmark and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End) and Elizabeth Acevedo (The Poet X) will pull out the tissues for this tender, quirky story of one seventeen-year-old boy's journey through first love and first heartbreak, guided by his personal hero, Oscar Wilde. Words have always been more than enough for Ken Z, but when he meets Ran at the mall food court, everything changes. Beautiful, mysterious Ran opens the door to a number of firsts for Ken: first kiss, first love. But as quickly as he enters Ken's life, Ran disappears, and Ken Z is left wondering: Why love at all, if this is where it leads? Letting it end there would be tragic. So, with the help of his best friends, the comfort of his haikus and lists, and even strange, surreal appearances by his hero, Oscar Wilde, Ken will find that love is worth more than the price of heartbreak. "An unabashed love letter to Oscar Wilde, Cole Porter, and the arts' ability to give voice to human emotion." --Kirkus "Linmark's novel is definitely offbeat and wild(e)ly imaginative...and a rich reading experience that would make the ineffable Oscar proud." --Booklist "A big-hearted book that...always keeps love in its heart." --Abdi Nazemian author of Like a Love Story and The Authentics "As surreal as it is real, as beautiful as it is painful, as playful as it is wise. --Randy Ribay, author of Patron Saints of Nothing
Download or read book Oscar Wilde written by Matthew Sturgis and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human—account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life. "Simply the best modern biography of Wilde." —Evening Standard Drawing on material that has come to light in the past thirty years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us Wilde's own experience as he experienced it. Here, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; a dreamy, aloof boy; a stellar classicist at boarding school; a born entertainer with a talent for comedy and a need for an audience; his years at Oxford, a brilliant undergraduate punctuated by his reckless disregard for authority . . . his arrival in London, in 1878, "already noticeable everywhere" . . . his ten-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, the father of two boys; Constance unwittingly welcoming young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers, and dying in exile at the age of thirty-nine . . . Wilde's development as a playwright. . . becoming the high priest of the aesthetic movement; his successes . . . his celebrity. . . and in later years, his irresistible pull toward another—double—life, in flagrant defiance and disregard of England's strict sodomy laws ("the blackmailer's charter"); the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years at hard labor, destroying his life and shattering his soul.
Download or read book The Picture of Dorian Gray written by Oscar Wilde and published by Union Square & Co.. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When handsome young Dorian Gray sees a painter’s stunning portrait of him, he is transfixed by its reflection of his own beauty. He is also troubled by the knowledge that the image in the painting will remain forever youthful and handsome while he himself will grow older and less desirable. He wishes aloud that the roles were reversed, saying that he would give his soul if only the painting would suffer the ravages of time and he were to remain forever young. From that point on, Dorian lives a life of hedonistic indulgence, knowing that only the painting will show his moral corruption.
Download or read book Who Invented Oscar Wilde written by David Newhoff and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 1882, before young Oscar Wilde embarked on his lecture tour across America, he posed for publicity photos taken by a famously eccentric New York photographer named Napoleon Sarony. Few would guess that one of those photographs would become the subject of the Supreme Court case that challenged copyright protection for all photography—a constitutional question that asked how a machine-made image could possibly be a work of human creativity. Who Invented Oscar Wilde? is a story about the nature of authorship and the “convenient fiction” we call copyright. While a seemingly obscure topic, copyright has been a hotly contested issue almost since the day the internet became publicly accessible. The presumed obsolescence of authorial rights in this age of abundant access has fueled a debate that reaches far beyond the question of compensation for authors of works. Much of the literature on the subject is either highly academic, highly critical of copyright, or both. With a light and balanced touch, David Newhoff makes a case for intellectual property law, tracing the concept of authorship from copyright’s ancient beginnings to its adoption in American culture to its eventual confrontation with photography and its relevance in the digital age. Newhoff tells a little-known story that will appeal to a broad spectrum of interests while making an argument that copyright is an essential ingredient to upholding the principles on which liberal democracy is founded.
Download or read book Constance written by Franny Moyle and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tells the poignant story of Constance in the aftermath of Wilde’s trials and imprisonment, and of her brave attempts to keep in contact with him despite her suffering.” —The Irish Times In the spring of 1895 the life of Constance Wilde changed irrevocably. Up until the conviction of her husband, Oscar, for homosexual crimes, she had held a privileged position in society. Part of a gilded couple, she was a popular children’s author, a fashion icon, and a leading campaigner for women’s rights. A founding member of the magical society The Golden Dawn, her pioneering and questioning spirit encouraged her to sample some of the more controversial aspects of her time. Mrs. Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in her own right. But that spring Constance’s entire life was eclipsed by scandal. Forced to flee to the Continent with her two sons, her glittering literary and political career ended abruptly. She lived in exile until her death. Franny Moyle now tells Constance’s story with a fresh eye. Drawing on numerous unpublished letters, she brings to life the story of a woman at the heart of fin-de-siècle London and the Aesthetic movement. In a compelling and moving tale of an unlikely couple caught up in a world unsure of its moral footing, Moyle unveils the story of a woman who was the victim of one of the greatest betrayals of all time.
Download or read book Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde written by Oscar Wilde and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1979 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Sir Rupert Hart-Davis's magnificent edition of The Letters of Oscar Wilde was first published in 1962, Cyril Connolly called it "a must for everyone who is seriously interested in the history of English literature - or European morals." From this edition, long out of print, Hart-Davis has culled a representative sample of the letters from each period of Wilde's life, "giving preference," as he says in his Introduction, "to those of literary interest, to the most amusing, and to those that throw light on his life and work." The long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, known as De Profundis is printed in its entirety.
