The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose

The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose
ISBN: 9780140433876
Publication Date: 1 October 2001

In his brilliant, irreverent essay 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism', Wilde turns an exuberantly sceptical eye on Victorian values and the institutions of property, marriage and the Church, asking us to envision instead a society made more vital through tolerance of individualism and disidence. Wilde pursues the argument for personal and artistic freedom in his essays from Intentions such as the acclaimed dialogues 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Critic as Artist', which provide witty dramatizations of his views on life and art and a profound expression of his aesthetic theory.

About the Author

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of an eminent eye-surgeon and a nationalist poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Speranza'. 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. He published a largely unsuccessful volume of poems in 1881 and in the next year undertook a lecture-tour of the United States in order to promote the D'Oyle Carte production of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, Patience.

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 ...