The Picture of Dorian Gray (Deluxe Hardbound Edition)
- Publisher : Fingerprint Publishing/ Prakash Books
- Publishing year : March 2021
- Binding : Hardback
- ISBN : 9789354402173
- Imprint : fingerprint
- Age Group : Adult
- Language : English
“The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.” Meet Dorian Gray, the beautif ...
“The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.” Meet Dorian Gray, the beautiful young man with an impossibly charming face and spirit. As he sits for Basil Hallward—a deeply moral artist and a friend of the impish Lord Henry—who becomes obsessed with his beauty and wants to paint him, Dorian is enchanted by the perfection of his portrait. But, influenced by the well-phrased epigrams of the hedonist Lord Henry on the transience of youth and beauty, Dorian becomes jealous of it and wishes that the portrait bear the scars of his passing youth and age, while he would remain young forever. And alas, his wish comes true! Enticed into dissolution and degradation while his portrait is aging in the attic, Dorian engages in scandals and sinful pleasures. We see him go from good to evil. But is he any happier? This is a hardbound deluxe edition of the only novel written by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an arresting moral commentary and a classic example of Gothic fiction. With an unparalleled depiction of the Faustian bargain, this parable of aesthetic ideal remains a literary masterpiece almost 125 years after its publication.
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.
