Picture of Dorian Gray, The, A Longman Cultural Edition / Edition 1

by Oscar Wilde, Andrew Elfenbein

Overview

From Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Andrew Elfenbein, includes the novel and contextual materials from the era of Oscar Wilde.

This edition of Oscar Wilde's classic work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, highlights the novel's modernity in both its form and its revolutionary content, and traces its links to modernist literature and the culture of modernity alike.

Previous editions of the novel have only seen it in a late Victorian context, or as an extension of the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater and the “art for art's sake” movement. As presented in this new edition, however, the freshness and originality of the book emerges, along with its strong social messages. The book is a pastiche of genres that propels nineteenth-century realism into twentieth-century modernism ahead of its own time. Wilde's novel offers a myth for modernity whose hold on the cultural imagination has only strengthened over time-Dorian Gray's uncanny bond with his own portrait underscores the loss of selfhood everyone experiences in a world of images and copies, paves the way for the discourses of homosexuality and the understanding of lifestyle as identity so current today, and provides clues to the mysteries of modern ethics and politics. The edition also emphasizes the role of gender and the rise of female emancipation underlying the Sybil Vane subplot, a focus on women that intensifies the book's relevance to modern transformations of men and women alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321427137
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	10/16/2006
Series:	Longman Cultural Editions Series
Edition description:	Longman Cultural Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.55(d)

About the Author

Andrew Elfenbein is the Morse-Alumni Distinguish Teaching Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He works on 18th- and 19th-century British literature, gender and sexuality studies, the history of English, and cognitive approaches to reading.

Date of Birth:

October 16, 1854

Date of Death:

November 30, 1900

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

The Royal School in Enniskillen, Dublin, 1864; Trinity College, Dublin, 1871; Magdalen College, Oxford, England, 1874

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

About Longman Cultural Editions

About This Edition

Introduction

Table of Dates

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Contexts

Textual Issues

The Two Versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray

from Chapter 1 (1890, 1891)

from Chapter 7 (1890) and Chapter 9 (1891)

from Chapter 10 (1890) and Chapter 12 (1891)

from Chapter 13 (1890) and Chapter 20 (1891)

Chapter 11: Further Annotations

Victorian Reactions to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Reviews

Ward, Lock, and Co., Lippincott's Advertisement for The Picture of Dorian Gray

Samuel Henry Jeyes, St. James's Gazette and Wilde's responses

Walter Pater, The Bookman

Paradies

Robert Smythe Hichens, from The Green Carnation

George Slythe Street, from The Autobiography of a Boy

Wilde's Trials

from Regina (Oscar Wilde) vs. John Douglas (Marquess of Queensberry)

Aestheticism

Walter Pater, "Conclusion" to The Renaissance

Mathew Arnold, from Culture and Anarchy

Oscar Wilde, from The Decay of Lying

Joris-Karl Huysmans, from A Rebours (Against the Grain)

Science

Charles Darwin, from The Descent of Man

William Kingdon Clifford, from "Right and Wrong: The Scientific Ground of their Distinction"

Thomas Henry Huxley, from "Science and Culture"

Henry Maudsley, from The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind

Love between Men

John Addington Symonds, from "A Problem in Greek Ethics"

Richard St. John Tyrwhitt, from "The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature"

Havelock Ellis, from Sexual Inversion

Works Cited in the Notes

Further Reading