Oscar Wilde王尔德简介
Oscar Wilde
1854-1900 长篇小说:The Picture of Dorian Gray道林?格雷的画像童话:The Happy Prince and Other Tales快乐王子诗集:De Prafundis惨痛的呼声;The Ballad of Reading Gaol累丁狱之歌剧作:Lady Windermere’s Fan温德米尔夫人的扇子;A Woman of No Importance一个无足轻重的妇女;An Ideal Husband理想丈夫;The Importance of Being Earnest埃耐斯特的重要性
in full born , Oct. 16, 1854, Dublin, Ire.
died Nov. 30, 1900, Paris, Fr.
, Oscar Wilde, 1882.
Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England,
which advocated art for art's sake; and he was the object of celebrated
civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his
imprisonment (1895–97).
Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir
William Wilde, was Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, who also
published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift;
his mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a revolutionary poet
and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.
After attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College, Dublin (1871–74), and
Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with
honours. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as
a classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning
the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna. He was
deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and
Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly
by the latter's stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should
be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow
Pater's urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.” But Wilde
also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms
at Oxford decorated with objets d'art, resulted in his famous remark: “Oh,
would that I could live up to my blue china!” In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary
London, Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his
wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their
unmasculine devotion to art; and in their comic opera Patience, Gilbert
and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” partly
on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his
own expense, Poems (1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship
to the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Keats.
Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States
and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City
that he had “nothing to declare but his genius.” Despite widespread
hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet
jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months
exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great
Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.
In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish
barrister; two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born, in 1885 and 1886.
Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman's World (1887–89). During this period of apprenticeship
as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale.
In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of
his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott's Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded
by six chapters, 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the
Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. Critics
charged immorality despite Dorian's self-destruction; Wilde, however,
insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral
ending. Intentions (1891), consisting of previously published essays, restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the
French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American
painter James McNeill Whistler. In the same year, two volumes of stories
and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to his extraordinary creative
inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories and A House
of Pomegranates.
But Wilde's greatest successes were his society comedies. Within the
conventions of the French “well-made play” (with its social intrigues
and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employed his paradoxical,
epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English
theatre. His first success, Lady Windermere's Fan, demonstrated that this
wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama. In the same year,
rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé, written in French and designed,
as he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural
passion, were halted by the censor because it contained biblical
characters. It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared
in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley's celebrated illustrations.
A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced 1893),
convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde's plays “must be taken
on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession, Wilde's final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest,
were produced early in 1895. In the latter, his greatest achievement, the
conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric
epigrams—seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian
hypocrisies.
I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore.
But to be out of it simply a tragedy.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something
sensational to read in the train.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does.
That's his.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked
and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and
consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde
insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself
approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. In addition,
his close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891,
infuriated the Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas' father. Accused, finally,
by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued for
criminal libel. Wilde's case collapsed, however, when the evidence went
against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France by his friends,
Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was
arrested and ordered to stand trial.
Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In
the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years
at hard labour. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where
he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut
version as De Profundis) filled with recriminations against the younger
man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.
In May 1897 Wilde was released, a bankrupt, and immediately went to France,
hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however,
was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane
prison conditions. Despite constant money problems he maintained, as
George Bernard Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that
sustained him, and he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm
and Robert Ross, later his literary executor; he was also reunited with
Douglas. He died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear
infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the
Roman Catholic church, which he had long admired.
Karl Beckson
Biographical information can be found in Vincent O'Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (1936, reprinted 1977); Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde, rev. ed. (1954, reprinted 1978); Vyvyan B. Holland, Oscar Wilde (1960, reissued 1988), by Wilde's son; Philippe Jullian, Oscar Wilde (1969); Martin Fido, Oscar Wilde (1973, reissued 1988); H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (1975, reprinted 1981); Louis Kronenberger, Oscar Wilde (1976); Sheridan Morley, Oscar Wilde (1976); and Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1988). Important critical studies include Edouard Roditi, Oscar Wilde (1947, reissued 1986); Epifanio San Juan, Jr., The Art of Oscar Wilde (1967, reprinted 1978); Richard Ellmann (ed.), Oscar Wilde: A Collection of
Critical Essays (1969); Karl Beckson (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Critical
Heritage (1970); Alan Bird, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (1977); Donald H. Ericksen, Oscar Wilde (1977); Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (1977); Robert Keith Miller, Oscar Wilde (1982); Katharine Worth, Oscar Wilde (1983), a reassessment; and Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the
Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986). Jerusha
McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman (1998), examines Wilde in his context.
本文档为【Oscar Wilde王尔德简介】,请使用软件OFFICE或WPS软件打开。作品中的文字与图均可以修改和编辑,
图片更改请在作品中右键图片并更换,文字修改请直接点击文字进行修改,也可以新增和删除文档中的内容。
该文档来自用户分享,如有侵权行为请发邮件ishare@vip.sina.com联系网站客服,我们会及时删除。
[版权声明] 本站所有资料为用户分享产生,若发现您的权利被侵害,请联系客服邮件isharekefu@iask.cn,我们尽快处理。
本作品所展示的图片、画像、字体、音乐的版权可能需版权方额外授权,请谨慎使用。
网站提供的党政主题相关内容(国旗、国徽、党徽..)目的在于配合国家政策宣传,仅限个人学习分享使用,禁止用于任何广告和商用目的。