Plays, Prose Writings and Poems

The ebullient evangelist of irony, Wilde preached his gospel of wit and aestheticism to a public at once outraged and enchanted. The last word in elegance of expression and elasticity of thought, he turned proprieties inside out with his dazzling paradoxes. His effortless epigrams ridiculed conventional wisdom in all its lumbering obtuseness, cosy complacency and pious hypocrisies.

An incisive moral and political thinker, and a brilliant critic, he was the greatest literary figure of the fin de siècle. This collection brings together work from Wilde in his many moods: from the perfumed exoticism of ‘The Sphinx’ to the trenchant polemic of The Soul of Man Under Socialism; from the dazzling sophistication of The Importance of Being Earnest to the poignant simplicity of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’.