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- Published: 3 July 2000
- ISBN: 9780141909318
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 464
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
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A selection of Oscar Wilde's best and most important plays - sharp, relevant and brilliant to this day
Wilde was both a glittering wordsmith and a social outsider. His drama emerges out of these two perhaps contradictory identities, combining epigrammatic brilliance and shrewd social observation. Includes Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, A Florentine Tragedy and The Importance of Being Earnest, which appears in full with the "Grigsby" scene which originally made up the fourth act.
- Published: 3 July 2000
- ISBN: 9780141909318
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 464
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The Lady of the Camellias
Alexandre Dumas fils
Faust, Part I
Goethe
Faust, Part II
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Selected Poetry
Goethe Johann Wolfgang Von
The Complete Odes and Epodes
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The Aeneid
Virgil
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Georges Perec
The Age of Alexander
Plutarch
Fall Of The Roman Republic
Plutarch
The Makers of Rome
Plutarch
On Sparta
Plutarch
The Rise And Fall of Athens
Plutarch
The Rise of Rome
Plutarch
Rome in Crisis
Plutarch
Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw
Saint Joan
George Bernard Shaw
Botchan
Natsume Soseki
Kusamakura
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Military Dispatches
The Duke Of Wellington
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Jules Verne
Treatise On Toleration
Voltaire
About the author
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. He then lived in London and married Constance Lloyd in 1884. Wilde was a leader of the Aesthetic Movement. He became famous because of the immense success of his plays such as Lady Windemere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 but was revised in 1891 after moralistic negative reviews.
After a public scandal involving Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was sentenced to two years' hard labour in Reading Gaol for 'gross indecency'. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published anonymously in 1898. Wilde never lived in England again and died at the age of forty-six in Paris on 30 November 1900. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery where admirers often leave the lipstick marks of kisses on his tomb.
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