Item type | Current location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Books | 824.8 WIL (Browse shelf) | Available | 034815 |
823.954 MEH Essential Ved Mehta | 824 MAH On art, literature and history : the non-fiction writing of Naguib Mahfouz | 824 NAR Writer's nightmare : selected essays, 1958-1988 | 824.8 WIL The critical writings of Oscar Wilde : an annotated selection | 824.9 CHE Selected essays | 824.912 FOR Two cheers for democracy | 824.914 RUS Languages of truth : essays 2003-2020 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Though he is primarily acclaimed today for his drama and fiction, Oscar Wilde was also one of the greatest critics of his generation. Annotated and introduced by Wilde scholar Nicholas Frankel, this unique collection reveals Wilde as a writer who transformed criticism, giving the genre new purpose, injecting it with style and wit, and reorienting it toward the kinds of social concerns that still occupy our most engaging cultural commentators. "Criticism is itself an art," Wilde wrote, and The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde demonstrates this philosophy in action. Readers will encounter some of Wilde's most quotable writings, such as "The Decay of Lying," which famously avers that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life." But Frankel also includes lesser-known works like "The American Invasion," a witty celebration of modern femininity, and "Aristotle at Afternoon Tea," in which Wilde deftly (and anonymously) carves up his former tutor's own criticism. The essays, reviews, dialogues, and epigrams collected here cover an astonishing range of themes: literature, of course, but also fashion, politics, masculinity, cuisine, courtship, marriage-the breadth of Victorian England. If today's critics address such topics as a matter of course, it is because Wilde showed that they could. It is hard to imagine a twenty-first-century criticism without him.
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