| Description |
160 pages, 24 unnumbered leaves of plates : illustrations ; 26 cm |
| Contents |
Preface -- 1. An Irish childhood 1854-1874 -- 2. Oxford 1874-1878 -- 3. The selling of Oscar Wilde 1878-1881 -- 4. Coast to coast: America 1882 -- 5. London, Paris and back to New York 1883-1884 -- 6. Constance ... and married life 1884-1888 -- 7. Dorian Gray and Alfred Douglas 1888-1891 -- 8. Lady Windermere ... and Salomé 1891-1892 -- 9. A woman of no importance ... and some panthers of considerable significance 1893-1894 -- 10. Two triumphs ... and three trials 1895 -- 11. Reading gaol ... and de profundis 1895-1897 -- 12. Death of a poet 1897-1900 -- Acknowledgments and select bibliogrpahy -- List of illustrations -- Index |
| Summary |
The story of Oscar Wilde has always been told in terms of hubris - Oscar as a child of the gods, lavishly endowed with every talent except restraint. In fact there is a more prosaic explanation of his theatrical triumphs and scoial collapse: Wilde was not a child of the gods but of the Victorians and his tragedy was that he allowed himself to remain one. Like Peter Pan, he refused to age and for that the Victorians broke him: his crimes were crimes against their ambiguous concept of a decent society, and wen he reached the witness box for the last time he was like a man in the wrong suit at the wrong party - only then realizing that he did not have the social strength to get away with it. To understand what happened to Oscar Wilde it is important to understand the climate in which he lived. By no means the cloistered, poetic hothouse in which early biographers were keen to place him, it was instead the commercial theatre and publishing world of London in the 1890s. A shrewd self-publicist with an eye for the headlines, Oscar had a journalist's sense of occassion. He left only one real mystery behind him: how could anyone with so well-developed a sense of his own image have failed to see the trap he was preparing for himself before it was too late? In this stunning reappraisal of Wilde, his work, his life and his times, beautifully illustrated with black-and-white and colour illustrations, the biographer and theatre critic, Sheridan Morley, seeks to unravel the enigma that has fascinated so many for so long. -- Inside cover |
| Notes |
Includes index |
| Bibliography |
Bibliography: pages [151]-152 |
| Subject |
Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900 -- Biography.
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Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900.
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Wilde, Oscar.
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Authors, Irish -- 19th century -- Biography.
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| Genre/Form |
Biographies.
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| LC no. |
76004727 |
| ISBN |
0030175860 |
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