The Decay of Lying: And Other Essays (Syrens S.) - Softcover

Wilde, Oscar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140389199 ISBN 13: 9780140389197

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1995

Synopsis

This is an edition of Oscar Wilde's essay in dialogue form, on the theme of art versus life. Two fashionably decadent talkers engaged in the "chit-chat" of the day - both an intellectual comedy of manners, and a provocative treatise on aesthetics.

About this title

About the Author

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. 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. 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 talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140389199
• ISBN 13: 9780140389197
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80
• Editor: Haughton Hugh