Download or read book The Invention of Oscar Wilde written by Nicholas Frankel and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One should either wear a work of art, or be a work of art,” Oscar Wilde once declared. In The Invention of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel explores Wilde’s self-creation as a “work of art” and a carefully constructed cultural icon. Frankel takes readers on a journey through Wilde’s inventive, provocative life, from his Irish origins—and their public erasure—through his challenges to traditional concepts of masculinity and male sexuality, his marriage and his affairs with young men, including his great love Lord Alfred Douglas, to his criminal conviction and final years of exile in France. Along the way, Frankel takes a deep look at Wilde’s writings, paradoxical wit, and intellectual convictions.
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 Aesthetics of Self invention written by Shelton Waldrep and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By printing the title "Professor of Aesthetics" on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation-and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde's life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized performers: Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde's fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century's cultural producers who would blend works of both "high art" and mass-market appeal. Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed. Shelton Waldrep is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the coauthor of Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World (1995) and editor of The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (2000).
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. Michèle Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history to reveal a life like no other.
Download or read book The Invention of Love written by Tom Stoppard and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry, scholarship, and love are entwined in Tom Stoppard's new play about A.E. Housman, which "Variety" has called "vintage Stoppard in its intelligence and wit". "Stoppard is at the top of form. . . . "The Invention of Love" does not just make you think, it also makes you feel".--"Daily Telegraph".
Download or read book Oscar Wilde written by Matthew Sturgis and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 0 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 Greek Epigram in Reception written by Gideon Nisbet and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the evolution and reception history of a collection of ancient Greek epigrams from the early nineteenth to twentieth century, the volume analyses the rhetoric which writers and translators brought to the text, highlighting the after effects of this cultural war on the interpretations of Ancient Greece in British print culture.
Download or read book The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde written by Oscar Wilde and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative new edition of nine classic short stories from one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era. “I cannot think other than in stories,” Oscar Wilde once confessed to his friend André Gide. In this new selection of his short fiction, Wilde’s gifts as a storyteller are on full display, accompanied by informative facing-page annotations from Wilde biographer and scholar Nicholas Frankel. A wide-ranging introduction brings readers into the world from which the author drew inspiration. Each story in the collection brims with Wilde’s trademark wit, style, and sharp social criticism. Many are reputed to have been written for children, although Wilde insisted this was not true and that his stories would appeal to all “those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” stands alongside Wilde’s comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, while other stories—including “The Happy Prince,” the tale of a young ruler who had never known sorrow, and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the story of a nightingale who sacrifices herself for true love—embrace the theme of tragic, forbidden love and are driven by an undercurrent of seriousness, even despair, at the repressive social and sexual values of Wilde’s day. Like his later writings, Wilde’s stories are a sweeping indictment of the society that would imprison him for his homosexuality in 1895, five years before his death at the age of forty-six. Published here in the form in which Victorian readers first encountered them, Wilde’s short stories contain much that appeals to modern readers of vastly different ages and temperaments. They are the perfect distillation of one of the Victorian era’s most remarkable writers.
Download or read book The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde written by Oscar Wilde and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serving prison time with hard labor for the crime of gross indecency, Oscar Wilde wrote some of his most powerful works. A savage indictment of society, and testimony to private sufferings, his prison writings--illuminated by Nicholas Frankel's notes--reveal a different man from the dandy and aesthete who shocked or amused the English-speaking world.
Download or read book The Picture of Dorian Gray written by Oscar Wilde and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited, heralding the end of a repressive era. Now, more than 120 years after Wilde handed it over to his publisher, Wilde’s uncensored typescript is published here for the first time, in an annotated, extensively illustrated edition.
Download or read book The Wilde Century written by Alan Sinfield and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how the characters in Oscar Wilde's plays, though not specifically gay, epitomize today's image of the effeminate male, how they relate to British theatrical fops and other characters since early modern times, how the representation of same-sex passion was altered by Wilde's expose and trial as a homosexual, and how the stereotype of the gay man became established in the 20th century. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Oscar Wilde the Great Drama of His Life written by Ashley H. Robins and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1890s Oscar Wilde enjoyed one of the most high-profile reputations in Britain; yet, virtually overnight, he was plunged into disgrace and ruin. What were the reasons for this extraordinary reversal of fortune? Ashley Robins explores Wilde's motivation in prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry, and elaborates on the precarious legal situation that effectively quashed any prospect of a withdrawal from the lawsuit without dire consequences. He examines the medical and psychiatric aspects of Wilde's two-year imprisonment and reveals -- for the first time and based on the original Home Office records -- the machinations among prison officials and doctors to cover up Wilde's state of health. Wilde's medical history is presented with an expert evaluation of his terminal illness, including a resolution of the syphilis controversy. Robins details Wilde's tangled matrimonial affairs during his imprisonment and goes on to disclose the manoeuvres adopted by friends to secure his early release, citing hitherto unpublished letters to show that bribery of prison personnel was seriously contemplated. The issue of homosexuality is discussed not only in relation to Oscar Wilde but from the broader historical, legal and biological perspective. The author portrays Wilde's character and behaviour through the images he projected onto society, by the strong but mixed public reaction to him, and by the quality of his interpersonal relationships with his wife, family and close friends. Finally, Wilde's personality is assessed using internationally accepted diagnostic criteria; and, in an unusual and innovative experiment, a group of Wildean scholars completed a psychological questionnaire as if they were doing so for Oscar Wilde himself. Drawing on these findings and on his own extensive psychiatric experience, Ashley Robins concludes that Wilde had a disorder of personality that culminated in the final and tragic phase of his life.
Download or read book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Pulitzer Prize Winner written by Junot Díaz and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
Download or read book Oscar s Ghost written by Laura Lee and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic story of the legal and emotional battle that raged between two of Oscar Wilde's closest friends – both former lovers – following the playwright's death
Download or read book The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde written by Oscar Wilde and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Green Carnation written by Robert Hichens and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Oscar written by Matthew Sturgis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years, and the most complete telling of his life and times to date. NOMINATED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2019 'The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade' TLS 'Simply the best modern biography of Wilde... A terrific achievement' Evening Standard 'Page-turning... Vivid and desperately moving. However much you think you know Wilde, this book will absorb and entertain you' The Sunday TimesBooks of the Year Oscar Wilde's life – like his wit – was alive with paradox. He was both an early exponent and a victim of 'celebrity culture': famous for being famous, he was lauded and ridiculed in equal measure. His achievements were frequently downplayed, his successes resented. He had a genius for comedy but strove to write tragedies. He was an unabashed snob who nevertheless delighted in exposing the faults of society. He affected a dandified disdain but was prone to great acts of kindness. Although happily married, he became a passionate lover of men and – at the very peak of his success – brought disaster upon himself. He disparaged authority, yet went to the law to defend his love for Lord Alfred Douglas. Having delighted in fashionable throngs, Wilde died almost alone. Above all, his flamboyant refusal to conform to the social and sexual orthodoxies of his day make him a hero and an inspiration to all who seek to challenge convention. Matthew Sturgis draws on a wealth of new material and fresh research, bringing alive the distinctive mood and characters of the fin de siècle in the richest and most compelling portrait of Wilde to date.
