With an Introduction and Notes by John M.L. Drew, University of Buckingham.Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative Preface, challenging the reader to believe in 'art for art's sake', to its sensational conclusion, the story self-consciously experiments with the notion of sin as an ...

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thru...

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine. The magazine's editors feared the story was indecent as submitted, so they censored roughly 500 words, without Wilde's knowledge, before publication. But even with that, the story was still greeted with outrage by British reviewers, some of whom suggested that Wilde should be prosecuted on moral...

Dorian Gray is the subject of a full-length portrait in oil by Basil Hallward, an artist impressed and infatuated by Dorian's beauty; he believes that Dorian's beauty is responsible for the new mood in his art as a painter.

This file includes the novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" plus "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories". The "other" stories are: The Canterville Ghost, The Sphinx Without a Secret, The ModelMillionaire, and The Portrait of Mr. W. H. According to Wikipedia: "Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. T...

Over 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores material, including instances of graphic homosexual content, removed by the novel’s first editor, who feared it would be “offensive” to Victorians.

Contents: The Decay of Lying Pen, Pencil And Poison The Critic As Artist The Truth of Masks

Named for Dr. Johnson's "common reader," Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader: First Series (1925) gathers essays that move freely across English and European literature, from Chaucer, Montaigne, and Defoe to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Russian novelists. Its style is agile, intimate, and exploratory: Woolf replaces pedantic judgment with an art of responsive reading, blending biography, quotation, psychological insight, and modernist impression. In the context of early twentieth-cent...

'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.' When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses...

This collection includes: Shorter ProsePieces, A Critic in Pall Masll, Essays and Lectures, Intentions, The Soul of Man, Miscellanies, Reviews, and Selected Prose. According to Wikipedia: "Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his i...

The first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published as the lead story in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, along with five others. The story begins with a man painting a picture of Gray. When Gray, who has a "face like ivory and rose leaves" sees his finished portrait he breaks down, distraught that his beauty will fade, but the portrait stay beautiful, inadvertently making a faustian bargain. For Wilde, the purpose of art would guide life if beauty alone we...

A fashionable young man sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty in Oscar Wilde's fascinating gothic tale.The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel, is the enduringly eerie story of a naïve and irresistible young man lured by decadent Lord Henry Wotton into a life of depravity. Though Dorian is steeped in sin, his face remains perfect, unlined as years pass—while only his portrait, locked away, reveals the blackness of his soul. T...