Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

THE MASTER (#litres_trial_promo)

THE HOUSE OF JUDGMENT (#litres_trial_promo)

THE TEACHER OF WISDOM (#litres_trial_promo)

ESSAYS, SELECTED JOURNALISM, LECTURES AND LETTERS (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction by MERLIN HOLLAND (#litres_trial_promo)

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL (#litres_trial_promo)

THE DECORATIVE ARTS (#litres_trial_promo)

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA (#litres_trial_promo)

MRS LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK (#litres_trial_promo)

WOMAN’S DRESS (#litres_trial_promo)

MR WHISTLER’S TEN O’CLOCK (#litres_trial_promo)

DINNERS AND DISHES (#litres_trial_promo)

HAMLET AT THE LYCEUM (#litres_trial_promo)

OLIVIA AT THE LYCEUM (#litres_trial_promo)

A HANDBOOK TO MARRIAGE (#litres_trial_promo)

BALZAC IN ENGLISH (#litres_trial_promo)

A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO (#litres_trial_promo)

THE AMERICAN INVASION (#litres_trial_promo)

TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF KEATS (#litres_trial_promo)

ARISTOTLE AT AFTERNOON TEA (#litres_trial_promo)

MR MORRIS ON TAPESTRY (#litres_trial_promo)

LONDON MODELS (#litres_trial_promo)

DE PROFUNDIS (#litres_trial_promo)

TWO LETTERS TO THE DAILY CHRONICLE (#litres_trial_promo)

THE DECAY OF LYING (#litres_trial_promo)

PEN, PENCIL AND POISON (#litres_trial_promo)

THE CRITIC AS ARTIST (#litres_trial_promo)

THE TRUTH OF MASKS (#litres_trial_promo)

THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM (#litres_trial_promo)

THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM (#litres_trial_promo)

A FEW MAXIMS FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF THE OVER-EDUCATED (#litres_trial_promo)

PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX B: ORDER OF POEMS (1882) (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX C: LIST OF ORIGINAL DEDICATIONS IN WILDE’S PUBLISHED WORKS (#litres_trial_promo)

APPENDIX D: INDEX OF FIRST LINES OF POEMS (#litres_trial_promo)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

THE CONTRIBUTORS (#ulink_052334b1-a927-5988-ab77-ff6fbcf4ecf0)

Owen Dudley Edwards, a Dubliner, was initially trained in historical research by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, who was then editing The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962). His own books include The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde (1989), and he has a biography of Oscar Wilde in preparation. He is now Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh, and is also a writer, broadcaster and theatre critic, whose first play will be staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1994.

Terence Brown holds a personal chair in the School of English in Trinity College, Dublin. He is a Fellow of Trinity College and also a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has written and edited many books. Among his publications are Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (1975), Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (1975), Ireland: a Social and Cultural History (1981, 2nd edition 1985), and Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (1986). He has recently published an edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1992), was a contributing editor of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1992), and is currently at work on a book on Yeats. He has lectured on Anglo-Irish Literature in many parts of the world.

Declan Kiberd lectures in Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin. He is author of Synge and the Irish Language (1979, second edition 1993) and Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (1985). He edited the section on Wilde in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) and has lectured on the author in more than fifteen countries. Among his other scholarly commentaries are The Students’ Annotated Ulysses (Penguin 1992) and Anglo-Irish Attitudes (Derry, 1984).

Merlin Holland, son of Vyvyan Holland and grandson of Oscar Wilde, writes, lectures and broadcasts regularly on all aspects of Wilde’s life and works. For twenty-five years he has been in the unique position, through having to administer the few remaining copyrights in Wilde’s writings (mostly letters and unpublished fragmentary manuscripts), of being in close touch with the latest academic research while presenting his grandfather to a wider general audience. He is the wine-correspondent of Country Life.

After Wilde’s conviction, his wife, Constance, and their sons were forced to change their name to Holland after being refused accommodation at a Swiss hotel. The family has never reverted to the name Wilde.

INTRODUCTION TO THE 1994 EDITION by MERLIN HOLLAND (#ulink_76504cda-a705-57de-ba6a-192b6eaf9b4e)

At an international conference on Wilde in May 1993, a highly respected academic and specialist in Anglo-Irish literature put to his audience the question: ‘Is Oscar Wilde really a great writer?’ I suspect that his own mind had already been made up, for he added by way of a guideline, ‘Why do so many of those who study his works end up by calling him “Oscar” in a rather over-familiar fashion?’, as if an author worthy of serious study should make himself less accessible and behave with somewhat more decorum. It is a question which his critics have been asking repeatedly for a hundred years and for which there still seems to be no satisfactory answer.

Within days of his death the Pall Mall Gazette was saying ‘Mr Wilde’s gifts included supreme intellectual ability, but nothing he ever wrote had strength to endure.’ In 1910 Edmund Gosse wrote to Andre Gide: ‘Of course he was not a “great writer”…his works, taken without his life, present to a sane criticism, a mediocre figure.’ An Evening Standard article by Arnold Bennett in 1927 treats him as outmoded and his style as lacking in permanence but grudgingly concedes ‘Wilde, even if he was not a first rate writer, had given keen pleasure to simpletons such as my younger self; and he was a first rate figure.’ And as late as 1950, the Times Literary Supplement said rather condescendingly, ‘Apart from one perfect play, one memorable poem and De Profundis, Wilde left little with which, as literature, posterity need seriously concern itself.’

Yet forty-four years on, Oscar Wilde’s reputation stands higher than at any time since his theatrical triumphs of the 1890s. His works are never out of print and some of them have been rendered in to languages as diverse as Catalan and Arabic, Yiddish and Chinese. Scarcely a day passes when he is not quoted in the press or on the airwaves and the spring of 1993 saw the simultaneous West End revival of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest—the very same plays which were delighting packed houses on the eve of his arrest nearly a century before.

This popularity in defiance of the critics is his ultimate, unanswerable paradox, thrown down like a challenge from beyond the grave. His readers love him as much for his weakness and his fallibility as they do for his wit, his satire and his fin de siècle daring, and they remain endlessly fascinated by his outrageous behaviour. The same public which crucified him for his lack of conformity and respect for Victorian values in 1895, today holds him up as a martyr for individuality. ‘I was a man.’ he says in De Profundis, ‘who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.’ The unabashed arrogance of that when it was published in 1905, a mere five years after his death, must have been difficult to swallow, but today we are forced to see the truth of it. Wilde’s life and his work survive side by side, in a symbiotic relationship with each other, and despite all attempts by his critics to prise them apart and subject each to scrutiny, they remain more closely entwined than ever.