Vous voulez voir cette page en français ? Cliquez ici.

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
More Buying Choices
21 used & new from CDN$ 0.47
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
The Picture of Dorian Gray
 
 
Share your own customer images
Search inside this book

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Paperback)

by Oscar Wilde (Author), Joseph Bristow (Editor) "THE studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came..." (more)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
Price: CDN$ 9.95 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca. Gift-wrap available.

Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

17 new from CDN$ 0.47 4 used from CDN$ 10.75

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Picture of Dorian Gray + The Count of Monte Cristo
Price For Both: CDN$ 22.32

Show availability and shipping details

  • This item: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details

  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details

Product Details

Product Description

Review

It seemed to be an impossible task to outdo the former edition of 'Dorian Gray' in the World's Classics series, but Bristow has achieved his goal. The quality of the explanatory notes is, simply, superb, and the introduction is succint but informative,


Product Description

'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.' When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siecle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay. Ever since its first publication in 1890 Wilde's only novel has remained the subject of critical controversy. Acclaimed by some as an instructive moral tale, it has been denounced by others for its implicit immorality. Combining elements of the supernatural, aestheticism, and the Gothic, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an unclassifiable and uniquely unsettling work of fiction.
See all Product Description
Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
THE studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.* Read the first page
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Tag this product

 (What's this?)
Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.
Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags
 

Customer Reviews

1 Review
5 star:
 (1)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most helpful customer reviews

 
5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty Is a Form of Genius., Nov 2 2008
By Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
Oscar Wilde was one of the foremost representatives of Aestheticism, a movement based on the notion that art exists for no other purpose than its existence itself ("l'art pour l'art"), not for the purpose of social and moral enlightenment. Born in Dublin and a graduate of Oxford's Magdalen College, he initially worked primarily as a journalist, editor and lecturer, but gradually turned to writing and produced his most acclaimed works in the six-year span from 1890 to 1895, roughly coinciding with the period of his romantic involvement with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, sixteen years his junior. Douglas's strained relationship with his father, John Sholto Douglas, Marquees of Queensberry, eventually resulted in a series of confrontations between Wilde and the Marquees, which first led to a libel suit brought by Wilde against his lover's father (who had openly accused Wilde of "posing as a sodomite" and threatened to disown his son if he didn't give up his acquaintance with the writer) and subsequently to two criminal trials against Wilde for "gross indecencies," based on a law generally interpreted to prohibit homosexual relationships. Sentenced to a two-year term of "hard labor" in Reading Gaol, Wilde emerged from prison in 1897 a spiritually, physically and financially broken man and, unable to continue living in England or Ireland, after three years' wanderings throughout Europe died in 1900 of cerebral meningitis, barely 46 years old.

"The Picture of Dorian Gray," Wilde's only novel besides seven plays as well as several works of short fiction, poetry, nonfiction and two fairy tale collections originally written for his two sons, is critical to an understanding of Wilde's body of work and his personality primarily for two reasons: First, because it constitutes one of his earliest fully accomplished formulations of Aestheticism, and secondly because of its undeniable undercurrent of homoeroticism; an inclination which, after a six-year marriage widely thought to initially have been a true love match, Wilde had begun to explore more openly around the time of the novel's creation (1890). The story's title character is an exceptionally handsome young man who, both in the eyes of the artist tasked to paint his portrait, Basil Hallward, and in those of their somewhat older friend Lord Henry Wotton, epitomizes perfect beauty and is coveted by both men for that very reason. Seduced by hedonistic Lord Henry into believing that beauty can literally justify anything, including any act of immorality, Dorian sells his soul for maintaining his beautiful appearance, letting his portrait age in his stead. (In that, his character resembles Goethe's and Marlowe's Faust.) He then quickly turns from an innocent youth into a cruel and calculating man whom society, in its shallow adherence to appearances, nonetheless never associates with any of the results of his cruelty, never looking beyond the surface of his handsome exterior and assuming that a man so beautiful must necessarily also be good. Ultimately it is Dorian himself who brings about his own downfall when he is no longer able to face the manifestation of his evilness in Basil Hallward's picture.

Upon its initial publication in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was widely scorned as immoral by a public neither familiar with nor particularly open to the concepts of Aestheticism and its mockery of middle class morality, and repulsed by the thinly veiled homoerotic relationship of the novel's protagonists. Wilde republished the work the following year, adding a preface designed to explain his views on art. Yet, it was that preface which, along with several of his other publications and his written exchanges with Lord Alfred Douglas, ultimately would play a devastating role in his trials, where Queensberry's attorney would come to use an excerpt from that very preface - "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written" - to extract from Wilde statements to the effect that any book inspiring a sense of beauty (including, as implied in the attorney's question, an "immoral" book, if "The Picture of Dorian Gray" could be qualified as such) was well-written and therefore commendable; that only Philistines, brutes and illiterates - whose views on art he considered invariably stupid and for which he therefore didn't "care twopence" - could consider this novel "perverted," and that the majority of the reading public would probably not be able to draw a proper distinction between a good and a bad book. It was testimony such as this, as well as the impending confrontation with a number of male witnesses ready to testify as to the nature of their relationship with Wilde, that not only caused the author's attorney to convince his client to drop the libel suit against Queensberry but also opened the door for Wilde's own subsequent prosecution.

If "The Picture of Dorian Gray" has a central theme besides the supremacy of beauty and the depiction of a society primarily interested in appearances, it is a call for individuality: Dorian's cruelty is brought out only after he allows himself to be influenced by Lord Henry's equally seductive and cynical hedonism; and similarly, Basil Hallward's blind idolizing of Dorian eventually proves fatal for the painter. - Wilde's only novel is one of the first and most poignant expressions of his own individualism; but unlike his protagonist, who ultimately pays a ghastly prize for selling his soul and giving up his individuality, Wilde paid as high a price for maintaining his. Like Dorian, he knew that "[e]ach of us has Heaven and Hell in him," and although this novel's preface ends with the provocative statement that "[a]ll art is quite useless," it was the very fact that Wilde put his entire being into his art that ultimately destroyed him. But like beauty, which is finally restored to perfection in Dorian Gray's portrait, Wilde's works have stood the test of time; and not merely for their countless, pricelessly witty epigrams. They're as well worth a read as ever.
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
Only search this product's reviews


Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject





















i.e., each book must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.