Authors: Oscar Wilde, Michael Page
ISBN-13: 9781597370035, ISBN-10: 1597370037
Format: Other Format
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Date Published: October 2005
Edition: Unabridged, 7 CDs, 7 hours
The ever-quotable Oscar Wilde once said, "Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it." From his outsize celebrity in Victorian London to his authorship of fiction, drama, and poetry that uniquely captured his era, it's fair to say that Wilde succeeded on both counts.
Spellbound before his own portrait, Dorian Gray utters a fateful wish. In exchange for eternal youth he gives his soul, to be corrupted by the malign influence of his mentor, the aesthete and hedonist Lord Henry Wotton. The novel was met with moral outrage by contemporary critics who, dazzled perhaps by Wilde's brilliant style, may have confused the author with his creation, Lord Henry, to whom even Dorian protests, 'You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.'. Encouraged by Lord Henry to substitute pleasure for goodness and art for reality, Dorian tries to watch impassively as he brings misery and death to those who love him. But the picture is watching him, and, made hideous by the marks of sin, it confronts Dorian with the reflection of his fall from grace, the silent bearer of what is in effect a devastating moral judgement.
This Broadview edition includes Wilde's full text along with an introduction, a chronology of Wilde's life, and several appendixes. All that for $9.95 makes this a steal.
Age Before Beauty | 1 | |
The Last Romance | 9 | |
Civilised Society | 25 | |
An Eloquent Fool | 37 | |
The Grand Tour | 47 | |
Unadulterated Country Life | 59 | |
Relative Values | 65 | |
The Prettiest of Playthings | 73 | |
Some Useful Professions | 83 | |
Unsound Art | 91 | |
Second-Rate Sonnets | 105 | |
Blankets and Coal | 123 | |
Sin and Cynicism | 135 |