Oscar Wilde’s Sharpest Comic Barbs in Miniature
This compact Wilde selection is a sharp entry point into his comic intelligence and social bite. It suits readers who want classic wit in a short form, with lines that turn manners, sincerity and self-importance into lasting satire and pleasure.
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Oscar Wilde’s Sharpest Comic Barbs in Miniature
This compact Wilde selection is a sharp entry point into his comic intelligence and social bite. It suits readers who want classic wit in a short form, with lines that turn manners, sincerity and self-importance into lasting satire and pleasure.
- Book Synopsis
-
It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself' Wilde's celebrated witticisms on the dangers of sincerity, duplicitous biographers, the stupidity of the English - and his own genius. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.
Ideal for readers who:
- Love to dip into classic literature through short, punchy and intensely witty curated selections.
- Relish razor-sharp aphorisms that effortlessly expose vanity, high-society manners and social performance.
- Want to meet the real Oscar Wilde through his signature satire, paradoxes and comic intelligence.
- Look for brief, impactful reading material that delivers immediate and highly quotable literary bite.
- About The Author
- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement. Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895. Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9780241251805
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics, (03 March 2016)
- Number of Pages
- 51
- Weight
- 58 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 161 x 109 x 8 mm
- Series:
- See all books in this series
- Categories: