Customer Reviews

The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition)

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

 

 

"The Picture Of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde is a deep, mysterious, and thought provoking story. It is the story of a man by the name of Dorian whose whole life changes when he meets a pursuasive character. Dorian is influenced in such a way that he is lead to beleive in evrything that this character says. In doing so he finds himself, or rather his soul caught in a "picture" of troubles. This is a novel that is boring and yet interesting at the same time. It begins rather slow, but the excitment builds as the story progresses. The author, Oscar Wilde, uses a tremendous amount of description. We found that the amount of description both hindered and harmed the story. There was a great deal of detail in the beginning that we found superfluous and boring. However, we also found that later the detail brought the reader more into the story. For the most part we all really enjoyed this story. We would recommend it to generally everyone(unless you are not one for detail). This novel offers the reader everything; murder, mystery, thrills, chills and more! It is a well written, perplexing and enticing story that you will enjoy and remember for years to come.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a deliciously creepy novel. Although the novel may often be romanticized, it remains solidly in the horror genre. The reader never knows whether to feel sorry for Dorian -- a handsome young man who is extremely susceptible to corrupting influences -- or to despise him for his own vanity and selfishness. There are certainly very few truly likable characters in this book with the exception of the artist, Basil Hallward. Wilde's writing, as usual, is lush, beautiful, and descriptive. The moral of the story is overt, yet deeply moving. If you've read Frank Norris' novel of realism, McTeague, perhaps you'll understand why these two very different books evoked similar feelings within me. After reading Dorian Gray, I felt melancholy -- even slightly depressed -- but I still could not put the novel down. The downward spiral of life (as in this novel and McTeague) evoked terror, yet, perhaps more importantly, it kept me strangely fascinated. Read Dorian Gray and learn something about life -- the ending is perfect and one of the most memorable scenes in literature.

Even on its own, Dorian Gray is a 9 or 10. But the Norton edition pulls everything together that you could possibly want to know as you are reading the book. Both editions are included, the 1890 version that was published as a serial, and the 1891 version that was printed in novel form. The 1890 version is much more potent, and clearly more controversial than that of 1891, which has many chapters added to soften the overall effect of the book. Profuse footnotes illuminate Wilde's sources, which range from the pedestrian to the fantastic. Finally, the book concludes with some contemporary responses to the story, Wilde's rebuttals of them, and modern criticism. After the book's end, the criticism pulls readers into making long leaps of inference and symbolic interpretation. The Norton Critical Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray transforms reading the book from entertainment to an almost religious experience.