The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde PDF Download

Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780060807337
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"In 1900, Oscar Wilde is living in exile in Paris. Impoverished, in failing health, and abandoned by all but a few friends, he reflects on his once-brilliant career and on the infamous trial and imprisonment for "acts of gross indecency" that shattered his life. A stunning tour de force, this poignant and clever novel--daringly written by Ackroyd in the form of a journal that Wilde might have kept during the last months of his life--presents a wonderfully entertaining and touching portrait of the life of one Britain's most famous literary figures." -- Back cover

Author: Barry Lewis
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
A reading of Ackroyd that maps the influence of his historical and fiction writings on one another

Author: Uwe Böker
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042014008
Category : Authors, Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The present collection of essays is the outcome of the Oscar Wilde conference held at the Technical University of Dresden, 31 August - 3 September 2000. The papers cover a wide range of historical and comparative aspects: they look into the status of Wilde as poet, dramatist, essayist and intellectual during his own times as well as investigate the meaning of his work for subsequent writers and critics, thus, giving an outline of the Wildean history of literary reception, intellectual discourse and media transformation. Intellectually brilliant and challenging, Oscar Wilde had been a favourite of the late Victorians, performing the roles of the dandy and the poet of art for art's sake. However, due to his questioning of prevalent moral double standards and his insistence on the autonomy of art, he was indicted for gross indecencies, convicted, and sent to prison. Instead of being ostracised, he became a source of inspiration for writers and artists on the British isles as well as on the European continent. The papers in this volume explore such topics as Wilde's concepts of socialism and aestheticism, his fashioning of the femme fatale and of the dandy, his use of fashion and of simulation, his impact on modernism and postmodernism as well as on genres such as crime writing and fictional biography, and the influence of Wilde on writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Joe Orton, Peter Ackroyd, Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Mark Ravenhill. Other papers focus on the reception of Wilde in Russia, former Yugoslavia, Hungary and Germany as well as on cinematic and Internet representations of Wilde. Critical and creative responses vary from the general to the specific - from traditional assessments to analyses of the arts of camp, parody, and pastiche; thus, indicative of the (sub)cultural appropriation of 'Saint Oscar' (Terry Eagleton).

Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782856163009
Category :
Languages : fr
Pages : 245

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Author: Liliana Sikorska
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631597712
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Papers presented at a symposium organized by the Dept. of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznaaan.

Author: Oscar Wilde
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Author: Susana Onega Jaén
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571130068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Providing detailed analysis of the recurrent structural and thematic traits in Peter Ackroyd's first nine novels, this work sets out to show how they grow out of the tension created by two apparently contradictory tendencies. These are, on the one hand, the metafictional tendency to blur the boundaries between story-telling and history, to enhance the linguistic component of writing, and to underline the constructedness of the world created in a way that aligns Ackroyd with other postmodernist writers of historiographic metafiction; and on the other, the attempt to achieve mythical closure, expressed, for example, in Ackroyd's fictional treatment of London as a mystic centre of power. This mythical element evinces the influence of high modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and links Ackroyd's work to transition-to-postmodern writers such as Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Duffy, Doris Lessing and John Fowles.

Author: Gyles Daubeney Brandreth
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 141169872X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
Sometimes something happens that gives your life definition. You meet somebody and everything in your life suddenly makes sense. Everything youve ever accomplished, Every mistake you ever made, And every bad thing thats ever happened to you was so you'd be prepared to meet this person. So youd earn the priviledge of their presence. This happened to Bishop. Except he is only 99% ready. Because, unfortunately, Bishop is a dog.

Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1786898950
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Two apparently harmless women reside in cottages one building apart in the idyllic English village of Little Camborne. Miss Finch and Miss Swallow, cousins, have put their pasts behind them and settled into conventional country life. But when a mysterious foreigner, Theodore Cadmus – from a Mediterranean island nobody has heard of – moves into the middle cottage, the safe monotony of their lives is shattered. Soon, long-hidden secrets and long-held grudges threaten to surface, drawing all into a vortex of subterfuge, theft, violence, mayhem . . . and murder.

Author: Matthew Sturgis
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525656375
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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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.