The Picture of Dorian Gray (Chump Change Edition) - Softcover

Wilde, Oscar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1640320628 ISBN 13: 9781640320628

Publisher: Chump Change, 1890

Synopsis

Unabridged version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, offered here for chump change.  Wilde’s only novel was a breakthrough of psychological horror in the Victorian age.

Is it about the author himself and his life of destructive indulgence? Is it about the dark side of mankind? Or the ability to appreciate the pleasures of life?  Decide for yourself in this classic that sets the intellectual bar for other psychological tales.

Contents

THE PREFACE     3
CHAPTER 1          3
CHAPTER 2          9
CHAPTER 3          17
CHAPTER 4          23
CHAPTER 5          30
CHAPTER 6          35
CHAPTER 7          39
CHAPTER 8          44
CHAPTER 9          51
CHAPTER 10        55
CHAPTER 11        59
CHAPTER 12        68
CHAPTER 13        71
CHAPTER 14        74
CHAPTER 15        80
CHAPTER 16        85
CHAPTER 17        89
CHAPTER 18        92
CHAPTER 19        97
CHAPTER 20        101

About this title

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."

Review

"Every line that Wilde ever wrote affected me so enormously." --Morrissey, musician "A heady late-Victorian tale of double-living, in which Dorian's fatal, corruptive influence over women and men alike is suggestively indistinct." --Sarah Waters, author, Fingersmith

About this edition

• Publisher: Chump Change
• Publication date: 1890
• ISBN 10: 1640320628
• ISBN 13: 9781640320628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104