Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s,he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays,his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
The Importance of Being Earnest,A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London,it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London,the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage and the resulting satire of Victorian conformity. Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour as the culmination of Wilde's artistic career,while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest an enduringly popular play.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The novel-length version was published in April 1891.
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas,also known as Bosie Douglas,was an English poet and journalist,and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford he edited an undergraduate journal,The Spirit Lamp,that carried a homoerotic subtext,and met Wilde,starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas's father,the Marquess of Queensberry,abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde,publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel,but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release,he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples,but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married a poet,Olive Custance,in 1902 and had a son,Raymond.
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist,art and literary critic,and fiction writer,regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book,Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873),revised as The Renaissance:Studies in Art and Poetry (1877),in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life,was taken by many as a manifesto of Aestheticism.
Mark Haddon is an English novelist,best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). He won the Whitbread Award,the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award,the Guardian Prize,and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.
The Uranians were a late-19th-century and early-20th-century clandestine group of up to several dozen male homosexual poets and prose writers who principally wrote on the subject of the love of adolescent boys. In a strict definition they were an English literary and cultural movement;in a broader definition there were also American Uranians. The movement reached its peak between the late 1880s and mid 1890s,but has been regarded as stretching between 1858,when William Johnson Cory's poetry collection Ionica appeared,and 1930,the year of publication of Samuel Elsworth Cottam's Cameos of Boyhood and Other Poems and of E. E. Bradford's last collection,Boyhood.
Salome is a one-act tragedy by Oscar Wilde. The original version of the play was first published in French in 1893;an English translation was published a year later. The play depicts the attempted seduction of Jokanaan by Salome,stepdaughter of Herod Antipas;her dance of the seven veils;the execution of Jokanaan at Salome's instigation;and her death on Herod's orders.
Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony,111 U.S. 53 (1884),was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that upheld the power of Congress to extend copyright protection to photography.
Cloud Nine is a 1979 British two-act play written by British playwright Caryl Churchill. It was workshopped with the Joint Stock Theatre Company in late 1978 and premiered at Dartington College of Arts,Devon,on 14 February 1979.
Richard David Ellmann,FBA was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce,Oscar Wilde,and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959),which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist,and his academic work focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
George Cecil Ives was an English poet,writer,penal reformer and early homosexual law reform campaigner.
Charles Carrington (1857–1921) was a leading British publisher of erotica in late-19th- and early-20th-century Europe. Born Paul Harry Ferdinando in Bethnal Green,England on 11 November 1867,he moved in 1895 from London to Paris where he published and sold books in the rue Faubourg Montmartre and rue de Chateaudun;for a short period he moved his activities to Brussels. Carrington also published works of classical literature,including the first English translation of Aristophanes' "Comedies," and books by famous authors such as Oscar Wilde and Anatole France,in order to hide his "undercover" erotica publications under a veil of legitimacy. His books featured the erotic art of Martin van Maële. He published a French series La Flagellation a Travers le Monde mainly on English flagellation,identifying it as an English predilection.
Pederasty or paederasty is a sexual relationship between an adult man and a boy. It was a socially acknowledged practice in Ancient Greece and Rome and elsewhere in the world,such as Pre-Meiji Japan.
Hartwell de la Garde Grissell (1839–1907) was a papal chamberlain and the founder of the Oxford University Newman Society.
John Latham,FRS,M.D. was an English physician. He became President of the Royal College of Physicians,and also updated their Pharmacopoeia.
Sewell Thomas Collins Jr. was an American dramatist,producer,and illustrator.
Prostitution,Considered in Its Moral,Social,and Sanitary Aspects,in London and Other Large Cities and Garrison Towns,with Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of Its Attendant Evils is an 1857 book by William Acton about prostitution in big cities like London and Paris. First published in 1857 by John Churchill &Sons,it was republished and updated in 1870.
Penelope is a 1909 play by W. Somerset Maugham. The play ran for 246 performances.
Charmides was Oscar Wilde's longest and one of his most controversial poems. It was first published in his 1881 collection Poems. The story is original to Wilde,though it takes some hints from Lucian of Samosata and other ancient writers;it tells a tale of transgressive sexual passion in a mythological setting in ancient Greece. Contemporary reviewers almost unanimously condemned it,but modern assessments vary widely. It has been called "an engaging piece of doggerel",a "comic masterpiece whose shock-value is comparable to that of Manet's Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe",and "a Decadent poem par excellence" in which "[t]he illogicality of the plot and its deus-ex-machina resolution render the poem purely decorative". It is arguably the work in which Wilde first found his own poetic voice.
