Staged in 1893, when Wilde had already achieved fame, wealth and notoriety, A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse comedy of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man on the make, with an American heiress and the post of secretary to the brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach. When he asks his mother to celebrate with them, it turns out that Illingworth is Gerald's father, who seduced and abandoned his mother twenty years earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition, and Gerald declines the association with Illingworth. This edition, which also analyses Wilde's various drafts and revisions of the play, argues that the playwright here continued to explore the rivalry between an older man and woman for the affection of a beautiful young man.

This is the first variorum edition of the 1890 and 1891 editions of Oscar Wilde's controversial novel, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. Drawing on manuscripts and a typescript, this volume reprints the thirteen-chapter and twenty-chapter versions of Wilde's narrative as separate works, enabling the reader to see the considerable changes that Wilde made to his famous story across a period of eighteen months. This variorum edition contains a comprehensive introduction that provides full bibliographical information about the two editions, as well as a detailed commentary that illuminates the extraordinarily wide range of references that Wilde makes to a broad repertoire of sources. This volume will be the definitive edition of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' for many years to come.

This volume presents for the first time the complete textual history of one of the most famous love letters ever written. Addressed to Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and composed in Reading Gaol, it was later given the title 'De Profundis' by Wilde's friend and literary executor, Robert Ross. It was Ross's severely abridged and sanitized version, published in 1905 and again 1908, which inaugurated the tradition of seeing De Profundis as the apologia pro sua vita of a broken man. This edition takes account of this complex heritage by arguing that Wilde's prison document may be seen not just as the basis of a letter (a typed copy of which may have been sent to Douglas) but also as an unfinished literary work which he intended for public consumption at some future date. Such a case is made by placing in the public domain, often for the first time, a number of different works, derived from different texts, each of which bears witness to Wilde's multiple intentions for his prison document. These texts comprise: the manuscript held in the British Library; the version of Wilde's letter published by his son, Vyvyan Holland, from a typescript bequeathed to him by Robert Ross; hitherto unpublished witnesses to that typescript; and Ross's editions, collated with each other. The commentary to this edition - again for the first time - sets Wilde's story of his own life in 'De Profundis' against the testimony of other players in his drama, including, most importantly, that of Douglas. In so doing it exposes the partial nature of Wilde's narrative, as well as the personal obsessions which animated it. The commentary also demonstrates a hitherto unnoticed element of Wilde's work, the extent and nature of its richly layered intertextuality and its similarity, in its compositional practices, to many of his earlier works.

In this important new book, Guy and Small develop a new account of literary creativity in the late nineteenth century, one that combines concepts generated by text-theorists concerning the embodied nature of textuality with the empirical insights of text-editors and book historians. Through these developments, which the authors term the textual turn, this study examines the textual condition of nineteenth-century literature. The authors explore works by Dickens, Wilde, Hardy, Yeats, Swinburne, FitzGerald, Pater, Arnold, Pinero and Shaw, connecting questions about what a work textually is with questions about why we read it and how we value it. The study asks whether the textual turn places us in a stronger position to analyze the value of a nineteenth-century text not for readers of the nineteenth century, but of the twenty-first. The authors argue that this issue of value is central to their discipline.

Nineteenth-century Britain saw the rise of secularism, the development of a modern capitalist economy, multi-party democracy, and an explosive growth in technological, scientific and medical knowledge. It also witnessed the emergence of a mass literary culture which changed permanently the relationships between writers, readers and publishers. Focusing on the work of British and Irish authors, The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature considers changes in literary forms, styles and genres, as well as in critical discourses. It examines literary movements such as Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and Decadence. It considers the work of a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers. It discusses the impact of gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism and book history. It contains useful, student-friendly features such as explanatory text boxes, chapter summaries, a detailed glossary and suggestions for further reading. In their lucid and accessible manner, Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small provide readers with an understanding of the complexity and variety of nineteenth-century literary culture, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

Nineteenth-century Britain saw the rise of secularism, the development of a modern capitalist economy, multi-party democracy, and an explosive growth in technological, scientific and medical knowledge. It also witnessed the emergence of a mass literary culture which changed permanently the relationships between writers, readers and publishers.
Focusing on the work of British and Irish authors, The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature:

• considers changes in literary forms, styles and genres, as well as in critical discourses
• examines literary movements such as Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and Decadence
• considers the work of a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers
• discusses the impact of gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism and book history
• contains useful, student-friendly features such as explanatory text boxes, chapter summaries, a detailed glossary and suggestions for further reading.

In their lucid and accessible manner, Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small provide readers with an understanding of the complexity and variety of nineteenth-century literary culture, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

The current debate about the nature of English studies has questioned the status of English as a discipline. In this 1993 book, Josephine Guy and Ian Small set this so-called 'crisis in English' within the larger context of disciplinary knowledge. They examine the teaching of English and literary studies in the United States and Britain, and argue that the explicit attempt by some radical critics on both sides of the Atlantic to politicise the discipline has profound consequences for the nature of English studies. They describe the state of disciplinary knowledge, together with its social and philosophical preconditions; they analyse proposals for reform; and they discuss the ways in which these proposed reforms would affect the three main practices of the discipline - literary criticism, literary history and text-editing. In the process they demystify issues and arguments which have often in the past been obscured by jargon and polemic.

The modern published editions in which we read the great literary works of the distant and recent past almost invariably embody the work of a textual editor. Recent literary theory has called into question most of the assumptions on which the practice of textual editing has historically depended. Notions of authorial intention, authority, the status of annotation and commentary, the relationship between 'literary' and non-literary works (such as letters and dictionaries), and hence the concept of literature itself, are central to this debate. This volume of essays, written by practising textual editors and scholars, addresses the practical implications of these theoretical issues, taking a variety of texts as examples for the particular editorial problems they pose. The works of authors as various as Shakespeare and John Clare, Samuel Johnson and D. H. Lawrence, Milton and Oscar Wilde are invoked to demonstrate the practical basis of an editorial discipline which requires theoretical sophistication but resists reduction to any single theory.

A materialist account of Wilde's writing career, based on publishing contracts and other documentation as well as detailed evidence of how he composed, this book argues that Wilde was not driven by an oppositional politics, nor was he an aesthetic 'purist'. Rather, he was thoroughly immersed in the contemporary 'commodification of culture' in which books became product. His writing practices, including his 'plagiarism', reflected the pragmatism of a professional.

The current debate about the nature of English studies has questioned the status of English as a discipline. In this 1993 book, Josephine Guy and Ian Small set this so-called 'crisis in English' within the larger context of disciplinary knowledge. They examine the teaching of English and literary studies in the United States and Britain, and argue that the explicit attempt by some radical critics on both sides of the Atlantic to politicise the discipline has profound consequences for the nature of English studies. They describe the state of disciplinary knowledge, together with its social and philosophical preconditions; they analyse proposals for reform; and they discuss the ways in which these proposed reforms would affect the three main practices of the discipline - literary criticism, literary history and text-editing. In the process they demystify issues and arguments which have often in the past been obscured by jargon and polemic.

The modern published editions in which we read the great literary works of the distant and recent past almost invariably embody the work of a textual editor. Recent literary theory has called into question most of the assumptions on which the practice of textual editing has historically depended. Notions of authorial intention, authority, the status of annotation and commentary, the relationship between 'literary' and non-literary works (such as letters and dictionaries), and hence the concept of literature itself, are central to this debate. This volume of essays, written by practising textual editors and scholars, addresses the practical implications of these theoretical issues, taking a variety of texts as examples for the particular editorial problems they pose. The works of authors as various as Shakespeare and John Clare, Samuel Johnson and D. H. Lawrence, Milton and Oscar Wilde are invoked to demonstrate the practical basis of an editorial discipline which requires theoretical sophistication but resists reduction to any single theory.

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.

This volume of Poems and Poems in Prose inaugurates the Oxford English Texts Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , which will for the first time provide students of Wilde with scholarly and textually accurate texts of his complete oeuvre. In it, Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson provide reliable texts of Wilde's 119 poems and poems in prose, including 21 never published in his lifetime, together with the publishing history of each poem, locations of manuscripts, all known variants and emendations, and a detailed commentary on allusions and echoes, imagery, and points of biographical interest. The introduction by Ian Small, co-general editor of the Complete Works, discusses the historical context in which Wilde wrote poetry and the conditions surrounding its publication.

Conditions for Criticism studies changes in the practice of literary criticism in the nineteenth century and locates those changes within wider movements in British intellectual culture. The growth of knowledge and its subsequent institutionalization in universities produced new forms of intellectual authority. This book examines these processes in a wide variety of disciplines, including economics, historiography, sociology, psychology, and philosophical aesthetics, and explores their impact upon literary criticism. Its thesis is that the work of late nineteenth-century writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde can be best understood in terms of their engagement with, and reaction to, these general intellectual changes, a view which in its turn reveals the seriousness of their work.

‘He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in … the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms’

Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction and comedies of manners – the stories collected in this volume made Oscar Wilde’s name as a writer of fiction, showing breathtaking dexterity in a wide range of literary styles. Victorian moral justice is comically inverted in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost’, and society’s materialism comes under sharp, humorous criticism in ‘The Model Millionaire’, while ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ are hauntingly melancholic in their magical evocations of selfless love. These small masterpieces convey the brilliance of Wilde’s vision, exploring complex moral issues through an elegant juxtaposition of wit and sentiment.

This edition includes the complete texts of Wilde’s three volumes of short fiction, together with ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’. Ian Small’s introduction discusses Wilde’s life, the cultural and literary background to his fiction, and the complex ways in which it can be read.

'My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's' Lady Windermere has a happy marriage - or, at least, that's what she believes until one of London society's gossips, the Duchess of Berwick, arrives with her daughter to voice her suspicions about an affair Lord Windermere appears to be having. It's not just the Duchess who has evidence, however. Windermere's private bank book shows that he's been giving large sums of money to a 'Mrs Erlynne' - on frequent occasions - and he himself even admits to seeing much of the woman. To add insult to injury, Windermere insists that Mrs Erlynne is invited to the ball that is being held for Lady Windermere's birthday. Employing the witty dialogue, social satire and outrageous paradox for which he is still remembered, Wilde's play shows us the destructiveness of gossip and superficial judgement, examines the ambiguous sexual morality and gender politics at the heart of the British ruling class, while simultaneously challenging our perceptions of what constitutes a 'good woman'. This student edition contains a fully annotated version of the playtext. The introduction includes an account of Wilde's life and a detailed analysis of Lady Windermere's Fan as well as its stage history. Ian Small is Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of a number of critical studies on Wilde and has edited several of Wilde's works, including a scholarly edition of Wilde's second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance, also published in the New Mermaids series.

Staged in 1893, when Wilde had already achieved fame, wealth and notoriety, A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse comedy of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man on the make, with an American heiress and the post of secretary to the brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach. When he asks his mother to celebrate with them, it turns out that Illingworth is Gerald's father, who seduced and abandoned his mother twenty years earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition, and Gerald declines the association with Illingworth. This edition, which also analyses Wilde's various drafts and revisions of the play, argues that the playwright here continued to explore the rivalry between an older man and woman for the affection of a beautiful young man.