The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had--in the words of biographer Richard Ellmann--a different look. Yet the Dorian Gray that Victorians never knew was even more daring than the novel the British press condemned as vulgar, unclean, poisonous, discreditable, and a sham. Now, more than 120 years after Wilde handed it over to his publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Company, Wilde's uncensored typescript is published for the first time, in an annotated,...
The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after...
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple," declares Algernon early in Act One of The Importance of Being Earnest, and were it either, modern literature would be "a complete impossibility." It is a moment of sly, winking self-regard on the part of the playwright, for The Importance is itself the sort of complex modern literary work in which the truth is neither pure nor simple. Wilde's greatest play is full of subtexts, disguises, concealments, and double entendres. Continuing the important cultural work he began in his award-winning uncensored edition of The Picture of...
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple," declares Algernon early in Act One of The Importance of Being Earnest, and were it either, mode...
