Oscar Wilde The Critical Heritage Oscar Wilde Karl E Beckson Ed by Oscar Wilde, Karl E. Beckson (ed.) 9780203197196, 0203197194 instant download after payment.

Since the number of articles, reviews, and books on Wilde that have appeared since 1881 is overwhelming, this volume necessarily presents a representative selection of reviews, articles, excerpts from letters and memoirs which reveal the spectrum of reaction by Wilde's most critical readers. I have avoided quoting from books—either biographical or critical—entirely devoted to Wilde in the hope that such material is generally available to most readers. Each selection is printed in its entirety whenever possible, except, of course, for reviews of Wilde's plays, which frequently give a summary of the plot and evaluate the acting. These parts of the reviews—not germane to our present purpose—I have omitted, as indicated by ellipses. In selecting items, I was guided by the dual standard of the intrinsic interest and representative importance of the critical statement concerned with Wilde's literary achievement rather than with his personality to provide, in the words of the General Editor of this series, ‘an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the time'. I have also chosen several reviews by such critics as William Archer, A.B.Walkley, and Shaw as well as reviews which appeared periodically in a single journal or paper in order to demonstrate how the critic or journal changed, or did not change, in its attitude toward Wilde. The Introduction to this volume, while drawing on the selections for a survey of the development of Wilde's reputation, also contains, as supplementary material, many additional excerpts from letters, memoirs, reviews, and articles (all documented) that are not in the body of this volume. Since Wilde's major works appeared within less than a decade and since his reputation underwent considerable change in the early twentieth century, I have included items dating as late as Arnold Bennett's review (No. 127) in 1927. In this way, the development of Wilde's reputation may be traced beyond the nadir that it reached in th