The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde
An Annotated Selection
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- 26,99 €
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- 26,99 €
Descripción editorial
An authoritative edition of Oscar Wilde’s critical writings shows how the renowned dramatist and novelist also transformed the art of commentary.
Though he is primarily acclaimed today for his drama and fiction, Oscar Wilde was also one of the greatest critics of his generation. Annotated and introduced by Wilde scholar Nicholas Frankel, this unique collection reveals Wilde as a writer who transformed criticism, giving the genre new purpose, injecting it with style and wit, and reorienting it toward the kinds of social concerns that still occupy our most engaging cultural commentators.
“Criticism is itself an art,” Wilde wrote, and The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde demonstrates this philosophy in action. Readers will encounter some of Wilde’s most quotable writings, such as “The Decay of Lying,” which famously avers that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life.” But Frankel also includes lesser-known works like “The American Invasion,” a witty celebration of modern femininity, and “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea,” in which Wilde deftly (and anonymously) carves up his former tutor’s own criticism. The essays, reviews, dialogues, and epigrams collected here cover an astonishing range of themes: literature, of course, but also fashion, politics, masculinity, cuisine, courtship, marriage—the breadth of Victorian England. If today’s critics address such topics as a matter of course, it is because Wilde showed that they could. It is hard to imagine a twenty-first-century criticism without him.
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Frankel (The Invention of Oscar Wilde), an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, gathers a remarkable collection of Oscar Wilde's critical writings. As Frankel notes Wilde's criticism extends beyond just essays or treatises as he pioneered a style of criticism in forms not typically associated with critical thought, including "the dialogue, the epigram, the personal letter." Included here are book reviews, letters to the press, dialogues, and excerpts from Intentions (1891), the only book of criticism Wilde published during his lifetime. Wilde minces no words in his review of A Handbook to Marriage, writing that "in spite of its somewhat alarming title this book may be highly recommended to every one," while of Coleridge by Hall Caine, he quips, "So mediocre is Mr. Caine's book that even accuracy could not make it better." But it's in his striking aphorisms that Wilde shines—combining profundity with cleverness, Wilde declares in "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young," for example, that "the well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves." Frankel adds an impressive amount of historical and social background, highlighting the circumstances under which each included work was composed. Students and scholars of literature will relish these witty, acerbic outings.