Customer Reviews

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If you believe literature's main purpose in existence is to induce pleasure, you could probably never find a better writer than Oscar Wilde.

All his plays are absolute delights from start to finish, even the ones that aren't The Importance of Being Earnest. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fantastic novel and a deserved classic. His poetry's derivative, but not bad by any stretch of the imagination. His stories, essays, letters, collections of epigrams, and other various writings are excellent reading as well, if you don't mind occasional melodrama or other minor missteps.

This is a relatively expensive collection, but one that is well worth it. I don't regret spending a penny. The print's a readable size and, to my somewhat expansive knowledge on Wilde, none of his writings have been omitted or forgotten.

Essential for those who want to enjoy literature while allowing it to expand the mind, but also looking for something deeper than Tuesdays With Morrie or other modern, popular tripe.

Whoa! I was totally unfamiliar with the works of Oscar Wilde, until I bought this one on a friend's recommendation. It's huuuuuge, yet incredibly beautiful. Dorian Gray must be one of the greatest stories ever told, his poems are razor-sharp, his letters not less, and every line he comes up with is quotable. If you want to make sure you don't miss a thing, this is the book to get (and try his biography, especially the part about the trial).

Most paperbacks the size of this one, nearly 3" wide, are hard to hold onto but the quality of this paperback is very good and text size easily readable. So far I have found every Oscar Wilde entry I was looking. Highly recommend.

The title says it all. This is THEE complete works of Ireland's gift to Victorian London. Wilde's plays, essays, poems, his sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and his last bitter work, De Profundus, (From The Depths) a letter to his lover and betrayer, Lord Alfred Douglas, is re-printed as well. For the price, it's the best way to add this celebrated, tragic wit to your library.

This is absolutely essential for anyone interested in Wilde's works, not the least for including the original four-act version of "The Importance of Being Earnest." This version of the play is delightful! Also contains Wilde's wonderful fairy tales and the macabre "Picture of Dorian Gray." Such wonderful prose, poetry, and drama -- perhaps the greatest writing of Victorian England.

This book is a sham. It is not the complete works of Oscar Wilde but, instead, a collection of sections.

Oscar Wilde's best plays, like "Salome", "An Ideal Husband", and his masterpiece "The Importance of Being Ernest" are among the finest in the English language, second only to Shakespeare's incomparable masterworks. Through his incredible talent and gift for words, Wilde takes what would otherwise be merely a silly parlour-room drama and turns it into an unforgettably amusing experience that tickles you with its smart humor non-stop. And the fact that you "get" the humor makes you feel rather sophisticated. I can't think of a single writer to match Wilde's gift for coining clever and witty remarks and paradoxical epigrams, both in his work and in his life. A few of his poems are also very fine, like "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Lastly, Wilde also wrote a highly thought-provoking novel full of ideas that can be called "poisonous" and provocative even today, about a good-looking man who falls in love with his own portrait and sells his soul for eternal youth, but with each immoral deed he commits, the portrait grows older and uglier while he remains beautiful and young. Very clever plot for a novel, no less clever than the dialogue that makes plays like "The Importance of Being Ernest" such a stand-out.

David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"

1) The table of contents were messed up. For example, instead of "Chapter One...[title of story/play]" it was literally "Chapter One...Chapter One".

2) The stories/plays did not have headings. The "Chapters" would end mid-sentence and start mid-sentence, without any sort of connection whatsoever.

Oscar Wilde is a great author, and if you want to do him any justice, buy the Collins Publication instead.

This is not a sensible product. It is a mess of randomly scanned sections with no titles or headings. Do not waste your time with this book, I'm sure there has to be a more organized collection of Oscar Wilde. General Books should be ashamed of their unmatchable laziness.

I wish there was some way to make this large tome more compact, because (if it were possible) I would probably carry it around with me wherever I went! I originally became familiar with his work because Carl Barat and Pete Doherty (band members of The Libertines, a fantastic British band) had mentioned him amongst their favourite authors. I decided to read "The Picture of Dorian Gray". I liked so much that I decided to buy the whole collection of Wilde's plays, poems, and stories.

Perhaps I am biased because I particularly enjoy literature from the 1800s (Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Edwin A. Abbott), though I must admit that I haven't come across anything similar to Oscar Wilde's work before. Wilde's profound ability of creating rich, imaginative dialogue is especially evident in his plays and his one novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray". Many of his plays, especially The Importance of Being Earnest, are too fantastic, too purely Victorian in nature to be imaginable as happening in real life. However, I think that it is the underlying fanciful, almost surrealistic quality of much of his stories and poems that make them most interesting. The sheer amount of quotable phrases found in his work is something to really be marvelled at. Not only the dialogue, but the quality of the plot is brilliant as well. "The Picture of Dorian Gray", a tale of a handsome youth's descent into madness and debauchery, is particularly striking. It makes me wonder what other stories Wilde could have produced if his life had not been so tragically short (1854-1900).

Though he might be more well-known for his plays and novel, his first published material was poetry. His poetry, as does his other work, embodies his ideals of aesthetics: "art for art's sake". The articulate, minute description of details which might go unnoticed or seen as obsolete matter a great deal in the aesthetic philosophy, as does the beautification of objects and art in everyday life. Wilde even had a tour of lectures on the aesthetic movement in the United States and Canada in 1882, though his philosophy wasn't well-received by the majority of critics.

Wilde had said that "The House of Pomegranates", one of his collections of fairy-tales, was "intended neither for the British child nor the British public". This is believable to an extent, because the majority of Wilde's material seems to be encompassed in a world of his own. He was incredibly proficient at putting down onto paper the very heart and soul of what he was trying to convey, which eventually contributed to getting him into trouble later on. The "The Picture of Dorian Gray" became notorious amongst critics as being a "corrupt" and "unclean" work, chiefly due to the apparently "sinful" nature of Dorian Gray and his misadventures.

This collection is 1000+ pages in length, though it didn't take me a considerably long time to read because I found the bulk of it incredibly interesting and well-written. Even for those who have read some of his work before (any poems, stories, essays, and/or letters), and especially for those who haven't...get this book! You will not regret for a moment the decision to delve further into the literature of one of the greatest authors that I know of.