Author: Josephine M. Guy Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
A materialist account of Wilde's career as a writer, Oscar Wilde's Profession contests three widely held assumptions about his success: that there is a clear distinction between his life as a journalist and his artistic celebrity; that he was an aesthetic 'purist' in his attitude towards his own books; and that his career was driven by an oppositional sexual or nationalist politics. The authors bring together evidence from the publishing trade, from Wilde's contracts and correspondence with publishers, and from documentation about his earnings (particularly the plays) to show that he always worked for money, but that he achieved far less financial success than is usually thought. Far from subverting the nascent consumerism of his time, he was thoroughly immersed in its values--in the commodification of culture in which books became product. At the same time, Oscar Wilde's Profession provides a uniquely detailed account of Wilde's processes of composition, springing from the re-examination of his writing practice currently being undertaken in the Oxford English Texts edition of his complete work: it surveys his writing practices across the whole of the oeuvre, and radically reinterprets the significance of his revision and 'plagiarism'.
Author: Oscar Wilde Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252034724 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
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.
Author: Oscar Wilde Publisher: Independently Published ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
Intentions By Oscar Wilde was published in 1891 when Wilde was at the height of his form, these brilliant essays on art, literature, criticism, and society display the flamboyant poseur's famous wit and wide learning. A leading spokesman for the English Aesthetic movement, Wilde promoted art for art's sake against critics who argued that art must serve a moral purpose. On every page of this collection the gifted literary stylist admirably demonstrates not only that the characteristics of art are "distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power, but also that criticism itself can be raised to an art form possessing these very qualities. In the opening essay, Wilde laments the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. He takes to task modern literary realists like Henry James and Emile Zola for their "monstrous worship of facts" and stifling of the imagination. What makes art wonderful, he says, is that it is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.
Author: Eleanor Fitzsimons Publisher: ABRAMS ISBN: 1468313266 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
“A lively debut biography of the flamboyant Irish writer . . . focusing on the women who loved and supported him” (Kirkus Reviews). In this essential work, Eleanor Fitzsimons reframes Oscar Wilde’s story and his legacy through the women in his life, including such scintillating figures as Florence Balcombe; actress Lillie Langtry; and his tragic and witty niece, Dolly, who, like Wilde, loved fast cars, cocaine, and foreign women. Fresh, revealing, and entertaining, full of fascinating detail and anecdotes, Wilde’s Women relates the untold story of how a beloved writer and libertine played a vitally sympathetic role on behalf of many women, and how they supported him in the midst of a Victorian society in the process of changing forever. “Fitzsimons reminds us of the many writers, actresses, political activists, professional beauties and aristocratic ladies who helped shape the life and legend of the era’s greatest wit, esthete and sexual martyr . . . provide[s] a potted biography of the multitalented writer and gay icon . . . highly enjoyable.” —The Washington Post “Fitzsimons brilliantly calls attention to the progressive ideas and beliefs which drew the most daring and interesting women of the time to his side. The depth and painstaking care of Fitzsimons’ research is a fitting tribute to Wilde’s fascinating life and exquisite writing—and really, what better compliment is there than that?” —High Voltage
Author: Oscar Wilde Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing ISBN: 9780880299459 Category : Wit and humor Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
Oscar Wilde is one of the most quoted and quotable men in history. He once boasted that he could talk spontaneously on any subject, a claim effortlessly borne out by the range and scope of the examples collected in this book. It is an entertaining, instructive, and revealing look at a man who is unlikely ever to be forgotten. "Oscar Wilde," wrote Richard Ellmann, "we have only to hear the great name to anticipate that what will be quoted as his will surprise and delight us. His wit is an agent of renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred years ago."
Author: Matthew Sturgis Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 0525656375 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 864
Book Description
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.
Author: Franny Moyle Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1453271481 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
“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.
Author: Josephine M. Guy
Author: Oscar Wilde
Author: Oscar Wilde
Author: Eleanor Fitzsimons
Author: Oscar Wilde
Author: Matthew Sturgis
Author: Alfred Bruce Douglas
Author: Oscar Wilde
Author: Kerry Powell
Author: Franny Moyle