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Oscar Wilde

  • Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
  • C.3.3.
Sort Name
Wilde, Oscar
Ratings
No reviews
Type
Person
Gender
Male
Date of birth
1854-10-16
Place of birth
Dublin
Date of death
1900-11-30
Place of death
Paris

Wikipedia

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.

Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.

He tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to the drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.

At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with men. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

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Editions

NameFormatISBNRelease Date
Das Bildnis des Dorian GrayHardcover?2005
Werke in zwei Bänden: Band 2 (Oscar Wilde)Hardcover??
Das Bildnis des Dorian GrayHardcover3-518-01314-91983
The Importance of Being EarnesteBook?2014-05-25
The Picture of Dorian GrayeBook?2014-05-25
Children’s StorieseBook?2020-12-23
Lady Windermere’s FaneBook?2022-03-28
Die Erzählungen und Märchen (Oscar Wilde)Paperback3-458-31705-81984
The Importance of Being EarnestPaperback?2014
Teleny und Der Priester und der MeßnerknabePaperback3-499-15376-91997-02
Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray (Süddeutsche Zeitung Bibliothek)Hardcover978-3-937793-43-62004
An Ideal HusbandeBook?1997-04-01
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other StorieseBook?2020-11-20
Su pantasma de CantervillePaperback97888980350382013
Dorian Grayn muotokuvaPaperback978-951-1-25774-52011
Ein Granatapfelhaus/Das Bildnis des Dorian GrayHardcover978-3-86539-190-22008
The Collected Poems of Oscar WildePaperback18532645392000
The Picture of Dorian GrayeBook?1994-10-01
Bunbury oder Es ist wichtig, ernst zu sein: Eine triviale Komödie für ernsthafte LeutePaperback3-15-008498-91995
Erzählungen und Märchen / Gedichte in Prosa: Mit 27 JugendstilillustrationenHardcover3-88400-217-11985
Lady Windermeres Fächer: Die Geschichte einer anständigen Frau (yellow cover with playing cards)Paperback3-15-008981-61998
Das Bildnis des Dorian GrayPaperback3-257-21411-11986
Salome: Tragödie in einem AktPaperback978-3-15-004497-11990-04-30
An Ideal HusbandeBook?2021-03-23
The Ballad of Reading GaoleBook?1995-07-01
The Happy Prince and Other TaleseBook?1997-05-01
Das Bildnis des Dorian GrayHardcover??
Der Sozialismus und die Seele des MenschenPaperback?1970
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Last Modified
2024-03-27