Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's critical essays are not mere literary commentary. They are philosophical performance art. This collection gathers the prose where his mind operates at its most precise and dangerous: the dazzling arguments of "The Decay of Lying," the paradoxical meditation on art and life in "The Critic as Artist," and the piercing reviews that dismantled Victorian pieties with a single perfectly-aimed sentence. Here you find Wilde the thinker, not merely Wilde the playwright. His doctrine that life imitates art, that lying is the foundation of civilization, that the critic creates the work she contemplates - these are not throwaway epigrams but sustained, serious arguments conducted in prose of almost physical elegance. The collection also includes his savage commentary on contemporaries like George Meredith, the unsettling "In Defense of Dorian Gray," and the enigmatic "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." What emerges is a writer capable of being simultaneously frivolous and profound, of making you laugh while unsettling everything you thought you believed about art and morality. These essays reveal that Wilde's greatest fiction may actually be his criticism - where the mask slips and something rawer and more radical emerges.