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The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde - Volume VIII: The Short Fiction (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R5,873
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The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde - Volume VIII: The Short Fiction (Hardcover)
Series: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
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This edition collects and prints all of Oscar Wilde's short
fiction, principally the three collections of tales published in
the late 1880s and early 1890s. The first of these was The Happy
Prince (1888), a volume which was aimed at the children's market,
and which capitalized on the growing popularity of fairy stories in
nineteenth-century Britain. This edition then prints Lord Arthur
Savile's Crime (1891), Wilde's volume of short tales satirizing the
manners and morals of London's elite in the last decades of the
nineteenth century-those 'upper ten thousand', as Max Beerbohm
later called them. In many ways these stories anticipate both the
themes and the devices of Wilde's later and highly successful
society comedies, including Lady Windermere's Fan and The
Importance of Being Earnest. This edition also includes Wilde's
second volume of fairy stories, A House of Pomegranates (1891);
this volume comprised tales written for adults, and contained
Decadent and what can be seen as highly sexualized themes. The
textual and printing history of each of these volumes is described
and explored in detail. The substantial commentary provides a full
critical annotation of each story. Wilde also wrote stories which
were not collected, most importantly a jeu d'esprit on the identity
of the addressee of Shakespeare's Sonnets-'The Portrait of Mr
W.H.', a piece which appeared in periodical form in the late 1880s.
Wilde expanded his story, turning it into a hybrid of fiction and
criticism, and in the process used it as a vehicle to describe his
view of the relationship-physical, artistic, and spiritual-between
Shakespeare and a (fictitious) boy-actor in his company, the 'Mr
W.H.' of the title and of the dedication of the first printing of
Shakespeare's Sonnets. This revised and expanded piece, which
remained unpublished in Wilde's lifetime, represents his most
sustained and eloquent exploration of male-male desire. The edition
prints in full for the first time Wilde's manuscript of that story.
Like the other works it prints, the edition also contains full
critical annotation which documents Wilde's reading on Renaissance
philosophy and theatre history. The lengthy introduction describes
in detail Wilde's metamorphosis from a jobbing journalist, whose
work often appeared anonymously in the penny press of the 1880s, to
an accomplished writer of fiction.
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