Wilde, Oscar

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 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.

Canterville Ghost and Other Stories (Oxford Progressive English Readers)

This popular series of readers has now been completely revised and updated, using a new syllabus and new word structure lists. Readability has been ensured by means of specially designed computer software. Words that are above level but essential to the story are explained within the text, illustrated, and then reused for maximum reinforcement.

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

The Picture of Dorian Gray

One of the strangest and most original stories ever written. Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray is the story of a hansom young man who stops aging after having is portrait painted. The picture begins to age in his place. Like a modern rock star the fame of Dorians hansom looks leads Dorian down a dark path. The novel gives a look into the strange back streets and underworld of Victorian London like no other book written at its time.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A young man of rare beauty, Dorian Gray is the very picture of the ideal British gentleman. When he is drawn into a life of decadence and lustful indulgence, he discovers a painting begins to bear new marks for each of his sins, leaving him as youthful and attractive as ever. And so begins Dorian's descent into a personal hell of lies, murder, and depravity.

The Picture of Dorian Grey

The Pictures 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. The young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward, who is greatly impressed by Dorian's physical beauty and becomes strongly infatuated with him, believing that his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. The fact that Basil Hallward is a bachelor hints that he is not interested in the opposite sex. 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 .

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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.