The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel

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English

Harvard University Press
14 May 2018

Biography; Biography: literary; Diaries, letters & journals; Literary studies: plays & playwrights; British & Irish history; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900

"""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."

By: Oscar Wilde
Edited by: Nicholas Frankel
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: Annotated edition
Dimensions: Height: 156mm, Width: 235mm,
ISBN: 9780674984387
ISBN 10: 0674984382
Pages: 370
Publication Date: 14 May 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Reviews for The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde

Frankel provides a valuable service in comprehensively editing these works for a fresh generation of readers.--Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are canonical Victorian literature, and Frankel's precise and well-informed notes will raise readers' awareness of Wilde's thinking on morality, crime, religion, sexuality, aesthetics, and prison reform.--Ellis Hanson, Cornell University