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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde

The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde

Frankel, Nicholas
Wilde, Oscar

Paperback

Letters & EssaysLiterary CriticismBritish History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0674984382
ISBN13: 9780674984387
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: May 14 2018
Pages: 408
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

And I? May I say nothing, my lord? With these words, Oscar Wilde's courtroom trials came to a close. The lord in question, High Court justice Sir Alfred Wills, sent Wilde to the cells, sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor for the crime of gross indecency with other men. As cries of shame emanated from the gallery, the convicted aesthete was roundly silenced.

But he did not remain so. Behind bars and in the period immediately after his release, Wilde wrote two of his most powerful works--the long autobiographical letter De Profundis and an expansive best-selling poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel collects these and other prison writings, accompanied by historical illustrations and his rich facing-page annotations. As Frankel shows, Wilde experienced prison conditions designed to break even the toughest spirit, and yet his writings from this period display an imaginative and verbal brilliance left largely intact. Wilde also remained politically steadfast, determined that his writings should inspire improvements to Victorian England's grotesque regimes of punishment. But while his reformist impulse spoke to his moment, Wilde also wrote for eternity.

At once a savage indictment of the society that jailed him and a moving testimony to private sufferings, Wilde's prison writings--illuminated by Frankel's extensive notes--reveal a very different man from the famous dandy and aesthete who shocked and amused the English-speaking world.

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