Books : The Picture Of Dorian Gray (Original Lippincott Edition)

The Picture Of Dorian Gray (Original Lippincott Edition)

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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9781840680171
ISBN: 1840680172
Label: Creation Books
Languages: EnglishUnknownEnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishPublished
Manufacturer: Creation Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: 2000
Publisher: Creation Books
Studio: Creation Books

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Product Description:
This edition, first published in 1890, was later subjected to various edits and rewrites following the advice of Wilde's peers who found the material too dangerous to publish. The subsequent British edition, containing 6 additional chapters, was to become an underground classic and literary masterpiece. The Picture of Dorian Gray remains Wilde's only novel.

In his introduction, Jeremy Reed contends that this original Lippincott's edition is both radically different from the later version and far more homoerotic. Arguably, it is this version which remains closest to Wilde's initial preconception.

Misogynistic, anarchic, unethical, and overtly homo-erotic, The Picture of Dorian Gray has become a blueprint for subversive fiction and has inspired subsequent literary outlaws such as Jean Genet, William Burroughs and J.G.Ballard. It remains a true classic of renegade literature and, one hundred years on, continues to shock in its disaffiliation from ethics.

Amazon.com Review:
A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."

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