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The Picture of Dorian Gray - Literary Touchstone

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition™ includes a glossary and reader’s notes to help the modern reader contend with Wilde’s many allusions and his complex approach to the human condition. Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, first appeared in 1891. Dorian Gray, a handsome young man, falls in with a group of “friends,” whose amoral philosophies he finds quite appealing. After he has his portrait painted, his frivolity and general demeanor degenerate into wickedness, but only the portrait bears the effects of his descent into decadence and serves as a powerful symbol of Gray’s internal ruin. Dorian himself, however, remains as young and unspoiled as the day he first sat for the painting. Wilde’s exploration of life without limits or consequences shocked its late-Victorian audience and remains highly un- settling to modern readers. We, like Dorian, are forced to reconsider whether total freedom and absolute knowledge are really worth their costs.

The Age of Innocence (Everyman's Library)

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The Age of Innocence, one of Edith Wharton’s most renowned novels and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York.

The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May’s disgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer, who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty.

Wharton’s profound understanding of her characters’ lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of high society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton's finest, most illuminative works.

With an introduction by Peter Washington

The Reef

They had found each other again in London some three months previously at a dinner at the American Embassy and when she had caught sight of him her smile had been like a red rose pinned on her widow’s mourning.

Sitting opposite, in the compartment from which he had contrived to have other travellers excluded, Darrow looked at her curiously. He had never seen a face that changed so quickly. A moment since it had danced like a field of daisies in a summer breeze; now, under the pallid oscillating light of the lamp overhead, it wore the hard stamp of experience, as of a soft thing chilled into shape before its curves had rounded.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."

Enthralled by a portrait of himself, young Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to exchange his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Thus he is able to indulge in his desires, as only the portrait bears the traces of his decadence and becomes a nightmarish picture of his soul.

Edited with an Introduction by Robert Mighall
Preface by Peter Ackroyd

Dorian Gray has just had his portrait painted. It is a perfect likeness of the quite extraordinary beautiful young man, and it prompts him to make a mad wish for eternal youth. In the years to come, he devotes his public life to and aestheticism-and his private one to decadence and debauchery.

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Short Stories (Signet Classics)

"Oh! In what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin." In their ideal of an exquisitely sensitive temperament that thrills to fine shadings in sensation, the principles of the aesthetic (or "decadent") movement are well suited to the tale of terror. No story exemplifies this better than Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The sparkling wit and zest for life of Wilde's characters combine with cold-blooded acts of horror to generate a deliciously twisted sense of elegance and evil, civilization and degradation. Oscar Wilde, like Edgar Allan Poe, shows us that what we find loathsome and frightening can also be beautiful.

LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME
THE HAPPY PRINCE
THE BIRTHDAY OF THE INFANTA

In Dorian Gray, Wilde's full-length novel, a fashionable young man sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Also included in the volume are three of the Irish master storyteller's short works.

The Picture of Dorian Grey

The Picture of Dorian Grey is a literary work that typically induces strong emotions from the reader. They either love it or hate it. For one thing Oscar Wilde depicted the world as he saw it; harsh, shallow and terminal. Brutal honestly is often not accepted en masse and some readers expect a feel good story as entertainment. Critics say that the novel is homoerotic and vulgar. It is important to know that “Socratic love” has been around for a long time and it was considered quite natural by the Greeks whom we consider the founders of our western civilization. Meeting in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. The novel has strong Faustian theme whereby Lord Henry Wotton can be construed as the tempter and the “dark side”.

Spooky Classics for Children: The Canterville Ghost, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, the Sending of Dana Da

Summer

This is the story of Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted into a family from a poor New England town. Charity has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, a young, educated man from the city. Edith Wharton's Summer deals frankly -- honestly -- with the sexual awakening of a young woman. Not surprisingly, when the book was first published (in 1917), that stirred a commotion. Deservedly so! Wharton had a very real gift; it's for good cause she's so well-remembered.

The Age of Innocence (Vintage Classics)

The Canterville Ghost

Oscar Wilde's timeless classic of an American family that buys a British manor -- complete with ghost! Filmed many times, its light tone and gentle chills continue to thrill new generations.