summer, I bought this,page book from a used bookstore in Gallway, Ireland forwhat a steal!, It was the second Oscar Wilde book I had bought that trip along with an Oscar Wilde tea towel and calendar.
Packing light is stupid anyways,
And, of course, now, during quarantine, is the perfect time to read it,
I wonder what Oscar Wilde would be doing during the pandemic, Okay I digress.
Now that Im done it feels surreal,amazing pages oh my god, But this book was great because I had had no idea about some of his shorter stories and poems and plays and found new favorites!
Here is a list of Oscars best, most wellknown works:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Windermeres Fan
A Woman of No Importance
An Idea Husband
The Ballad of Reading Goal
De Profundis
Heres a list of other works that I really liked:
The Canterville Ghost
Lord Arthur Saviles Crime
The Duchess of Padua
The Happy Prince
The poems Requiescat, At Verona, and Silentium Amoris
The Portrait of Mr.
W. H.
Id highly recommend Oscar Wilde, Im not even going to try to explain how much and why I love his work because as neither Critic nor Artist, I cannot do it justice.
Anyways, thank you Oscar, for all of the,pages of published writing Ive read in the pastweeks.
I loved it. Oscar Wilde is fabulous, and clever, and impossibly witty and Oscar Wilde knows it, Do yourself a favor, don't read this cover to cover
a little bit of Wilde goes a long way!
Random thoughts:
I was disappointed to find that the popular culture image of Dorian Grey didn't quite live up to the actual written depiction of him.
Apparently the Victorian's were easily horrified, and I found some of the examples of his debauchery to be head scratchers.
Especially his tendency to collect jewels and tapestries and such I'm sure there's some deeper meaning here, but I completely missed it.
“The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last, ” Willy Wonka was quoting Oscar Wilde, as it turns out, Before starting this collection I had actually never read anything by Oscar Wilde I have now read everything by Oscar Wilde, and can officially say I am a massive fan! His writing is incredibly clever and witty, but also riveting, humorous and beautiful.
My favourites would be The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Happy Prince amp Other Tales, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and De Profundis.
The works included and my general opinion of them are as follows:
PLAYS:
Vera, or The NihilistsStars
The Duchess of PaduaStars
Lady Windermeres FanStars
A Woman of No ImportanceStars
An Ideal HusbandStars
The Importance of Being EarnestStars
SaloméStars
La Saint CourtisaneStars
A Florentine TragedyStars
NOVEL:
The Picture of Dorian GrayStars
STORIES amp FAIRYTALES:
The Happy Prince and Other TalesStars
The Happy PrinceStars
The Nightingale and the RoseStars
The Selfish GiantStars
The Devoted FriendStars
The Remarkable RocketStars
Lord Arthur Savilles Crime and Other StoriesStars
Lord Arthur Savilles CrimeStars
The Canterville GhostStars
The Sphinx Without a SecretStars
The Model MillionaireStars
The Portrait of Mr W.
HStars
A House of PomegranatesStars
The Young KingStars
The Birthday of the InfantaStars
The Fisherman and His SoulStars
The StarChildStars
POEMS:
The Complete PoemsStars
The Ballad of Reading Gaol special mentionStars
ESSAYS AND LETTERS:
De ProfundisStars
And in the spirit of complete honesty, I actually didnt read the other essays included in the collection Intentions and The Soul of Man Under Socialism as I knew they wouldnt interest me, and so they have not affected my rating.
So essential it's not even funny, Not a better writer in the English language, Also if one can have a hero in this world, I think Wilde can fit that bill, He maybe the first writer that I realize was a rebel of sorts, My first actual rock n' roll figure that I looked up to,
I started reading Wilde as a young teenager due to the fact that he seemed to be the most glamourous figure in literature.
Most of my high school friends were into the Beats or such toss as Jonathan Bach, but Wilde was my as TRex's Marc Bolan would say mainman.
And the fact that I am straight to be attracted to such a guy figure had a great importance in my life.
Wilde represented a third way to me, The fact that he was outside of his culture appealed to my aesthetic plus it was sexy,
Oscar Wilde, born in theth Century and dying in the newth Century was truly an artist of theth Century.
Oscar Wilde I salute you! I FINALLY DID IT!!!
on the whole i loved the experience of being able to read all of Wilde's works.
I loved the majority o his works, but some i just couldn't't get into, . . i probably wasn't smart enough lmao
so yeah, took a while but i'm very glad i did this! I love Oscar Wilde.
His tales have been part of my life since I was a child, In my teenager years his plays were the "shelter" when I felt sad, His work is wonderful, but, in this special edition, you can find everything he wrote, even the poems which are not so good as his other works to me.
I have aedition of this Collins Classics with beautiful illustrations and a great introduction by Vyvyan Holland, Beautiful edition! All of his work is so truthful and blunt, I started off collecting a few works here and there and ended up having to get the complete works, I received this book as a gift from my dad when I was aboutyears old,
It's the special centenary edition,
It was love at first sight,
It's filled with my notes, my dried flowers teen me was oh so romantic and a piece of my soul.
This review is a workinprogress, I'm reading this whole collection, but will be reviewing the individual reads separately as I go along, so don't be all confused by the otherwise seemingly random posting of Wilde stories and plays.
I am going to skip reading sitelinkThe Picture of Dorian Gray because I read that just a few years ago.
My review is behind that link knock yourself out,
Individual reviews will be linked here as I go along, just to really annoy everyone each time it pops up in their updates:
Short Stories
sitelinkLord Arthur Savile's Crime
sitelinkThe Canterville Ghost
Fables, Fairy Tales, and Other Really Really Short Pieces Filled with Morals
sitelinkThe Sphinx Without a Secret
sitelinkThe Model Millionaire
sitelinkThe Young King
sitelinkThe Birthday of the Infanta
sitelinkThe Fisherman and His Soul
sitelinkThe StarChild
sitelinkThe Happy Prince
sitelinkThe Nightingale and the Rose
sitelinkThe Selfish Giant
sitelinkThe Devoted Friend
sitelinkThe Remarkable Rocket
Plays
sitelinkThe Importance of Being Earnest
sitelinkLady Windermere's Fan
sitelinkA Woman of No Importance
sitelinkAn Ideal Husband
sitelinkSalomé
sitelinkThe Duchess of Padua
Next up.
. . Vera, or The Nihilists,
Aug,
Another behemoth that deserves my attention once life settles down again, I will return to this after completing my graduate program, Okay, as recently, I'm mopping up some titles from "To Read Short Fiction Lists", genre and lit, and as I'm in the W's.
I hadpieces from Wilde on the list I've previously read a bit of him aboutstories, mostly thanks to Dedalus Books Decadence series but, for example, haven't tackled an obvious mustread like sitelinkThe Picture of Dorian Grey.
"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" is probably the most "Wildean" thing here, and in it one can see Wilde's black humor and some origins of a writer like sitelinkSaki in one direction and sitelinkP.
G. Wodehouse in another. British upper crust life had advanced to such a point, seemingly, that one could be terribly naughty by writing a deliberately lighthearted piece about coldblooded attempted murder, poison and anarchist bombs.
Shocking! That may sound like I'm being sarcastic but actually I'm not, it's just interesting to me how levels of privilege, culture, comfort and stability timed historically differently, of course, across varied social and class strata invariably give rise to an impulse like this, a turning inward, a jaundiced view of the status quo, satirically and cheekily expressed.
So here we have a society party of humorous cartoons lots of witty bon mots tossed around "The world is a stage but the play is poorly cast.
" where a nobleman Lord Savile, natch has his palm read and is told he will commit murder in the future.
Being a good upstanding chap, and not wanting to ruin his intended nuptials, he sets about trying to figure out who the least important person is that he can murder in his social circle.
Hilarity ensues as poison, bombs and drownings prove ineffective until chance steps in, Of course, part of the joke is that Savile never questions and we should never expect him to question the accuracy of such a prediction from a dubious source, because then the ultimate joke of basing your actions on dubious sources, and the empty trendiness of the moneyed classes and possibly their coldness to human suffering would be undone.
"The Star Child" is Wilde operating in his Fairy Tale Mode, In many ways it is a traditional fairy tale with an obvious moral a poor family finds an abandoned baby and raises him to be a beautiful boy.
But the boy is cruel, arrogant and hateful and despises the poverty around him, torturing small animals and displaying his ingratitude at every opportunity, so magically he is turned ugly and has to go forth in the world to learn humility which he does, by trying to complete three impossible tasks, aided by animal servitors.
The Wildean punch, when it comes, lies not so much in the classicallybeautifulbutcruel main character but instead in the short and oddly ominous last line of the piece, as if Wilde could not completely commit himself to the eternal awe and wonder of happily ever after.
"The Decay Of Lying" is an essay presented as a dialogue and, honestly, I'll probably need to give it another read and dissect it at my leisure at a later date because I was mostly in the wrong headspace when I read it.
Essentially, it's Wilde's barbed answer to the rise of the Naturalist/Realist movement in literature Zola, etc, which eschewed imagination and flights of fancy for close observations of the real world and people, Wilde believes this idea is terrible and sketches out what he believes literature and almost almost all art should consist of, how it should proceed and what its goals should be.
Sui generis, inventive and imaginative, essentially "effective lying" is the ultimate creativity,
Having recently codified my own approach to the arts well, certainly literature as that of a Generalist/Surveyor, I can't take an us/them, good/bad argument about literature so seriously.
I find such screeds fascinating not as an expression of "the truth" but as "one way of looking at things" from a particular position, in a particular moment in time, given what has come before, what was happening then and what was to come even as my mind begins to undermine the argument and, in case I haven't made my point, I'd have the same reaction to a pofaced essay about the obvious superiority of realism over imagination.
These kind of essays/arguments are important it was important that someone had them and they remain important as records of thought processes, as we try to move forward except we don't seem to be moving forward very much and those records seem to be ignored, as we seem to JUST KEEP HAVING the same binary us/them, good/bad stupid/reductive arguments over and over again even centuries later just recently, in my life in fact.
I do believe the human mind is vast and can hold many ideas, some of them contradictory, I do not think there is only one way to "do art" or that the term "art" is pretentious, or that "entertainment" is below contempt for that matter, OR that a perfect blending of "art" and "entertainment" is the Ultimate Goal for THAT matter.
I do think that different approaches yield different results and have different successes, achievements, failures and traps, This doesn't seem very hard for me at all and I wonder why people seem so driven into singular conceptions perhaps it's the varied arrogance and insecurity underlying the desperately clungto worldviews So, for example, when I read this essay I find it fascinating: Wilde is witty duh, charming, intelligent and erudite and his argument makes sense until I remember that some realist novels have, in my life, packed just as much impact as the imaginative ones.
I look at what he's saying and think "hmmm, interesting that the Decadents take part of his stance invention and artificiality and discard others by focusing on the dregs and degradation of real life".
I think of genre writers who bristle at being labelled escapist and regularly chalk up straight Lit as "boring" thus placing them in Wilde's camp yet Wilde would be appalled to find them worrying over research, realistic detail and promoting social causes and the underrepresented.
But I'll have to reread it, There's a good argument to be made that Wilde is deliberately overstating his case so as to have a kind of unspoken criticisms of its excesses built right into the text.
Still, lots of fun!.
Access Today The Complete Oscar Wilde Originated By Oscar Wilde Made Available In Hardcover
Oscar Wilde