Here is a collection of this witty and irreverent author's works--all in their most authoritative texts. Includes The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, and other stories and essays.

Includes the following works: Novels--The Portrait of Dorian Gray; Plays--Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest; Writings--De Profundis, Critic as Artist, and Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Very Young; and selections from Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and A Woman of No Importance.

The crowning plays of one of Ireland's most heralded artists

Oscar Wilde was at once a family man and a homosexual outsider, a socialite, socialist, and Irish nationalist. His contradictions inspired him to ponder the roles and masks donned in conventional society, and his acute and wry insights are wonderfully displayed in this collection of his essential plays. Known not only for his brilliant, epigrammatic language, but also for his sense of theatrical design, color, and staging, Wilde created an enduring body of finely crafted works, whose delights and ironies still speak to...

This volume of Poems and Poems in Prose inaugurates the Oxford English Texts Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. It provides texts of Wilde's one-hundred and nineteen poems and poems in prose, including twenty-one never published in his lifetime, together with the publishing history of each poem, and a detailed commentary on allusions and echoes, imagery, and points of biographical interest.

Oscar Wilde was already one of the best-known literary figures in Britain when he was persuaded to turn his extraordinary talents to the theatre. Between 1891 and 1895 he produced a sequence of distinctive plays which spearheaded the dramatic renaissance of the 1890s and retain their power today. This collection offers newly edited texts of Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, Salome, An Ideal Husband, and, arguably the greatest farcical comedy in English, The Importance of Being Earnest.

This is the third volume in the Oxford English Texts edition of the works of Oscar Wilde. This definitive variorum edition of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray reprints the thirteen-chapter and twenty-chapter versions of this famous story as separate works. The volume provides readers with the most detailed account available of the considerable changes that Wilde made to a controversial narrative that appeared in two, very different editions in 1890 and 1891 respectively.

Although known primarily as the irreverent but dazzlingly witty playwright who penned The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde was also an able and farsighted critic. He was an early advocate of criticism as an independent branch of literature and stressed its vital role in the creative process. Scholars continue to debate many of Wilde's critical positions.
Included in Richard Ellmann's impressive collection of Wilde's criticism, The Artist as Critic, is a wide selection of Wilde's book reviews as well as such famous longer works as "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.," "The Soul...

I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty, one of Oscar Wilde's characters says. Another remarks, I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. Before Wilde himself was brought down in one of the most sensational scandals of his time, he was sought after for his flamboyant personality, his scintillating conversation and his sophisticated wit.

Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides
Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author's most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel's corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, "a terrible moral in "Dorian Gray."" Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by...

The Importance of Being Earnest shows a full measure of Oscar Wilde's legendary wit, and embodies more than any of his other plays, his decency and warmth. This edition contains substantial excerpts from the original four-act version which was never produed, as well as the full test of the final three-act version, selections from Wilde's correspondence, and commentary by George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, St. John Hankin, and James Agate.