Name: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Rating: 4.169734876773711 (2678 reviews)
ISBN: 9781404373518

Oscar Wilde

Edward Petherbridge

When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siecle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses he stays magically youthful, while his beautiful portrait changes, revealing the hideous corruption of moral decay.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition? includes a glossary and reader?s notes to help the modern reader contend with Wilde?s many allusions and his complex approach to the human condition.Oscar Wilde?s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, first appeared in 1891. Dorian Gray, a handsome young man, falls in with a group of ?friends,? whose amoral philosophies he finds quite appealing. After he has his portrait painted, his frivolity and general demeanor degenerate into wickedness, but only the portrait bears the effects of his descent into decadence and serves as a powerful symbol of Gray?s internal ruin. Dorian himself, however, remains as young and unspoiled as the day he first sat for the painting. Wilde?s exploration of life without limits or consequences shocked its late-Victorian audience and remains highly un-settling to modern readers. We, like Dorian, are forced to reconsider whether total freedom and absolute knowledge are really worth their costs.

Picture of Dorian Gray

Pleasantly surprised, found myself ahhh’ing at parts. So many thought provoking quotes and ideas that can be applied to life today. Standout line : “Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible?”

Thema Archer

The Picture of Dorian Gray, the only novel by Oscar Wilde, was first published in 1890. A substantially revised and expanded edition was published in April 1891. For the new edition, Wilde revised the content of the novel's existing chapters, divided the final chapter into two chapters, and created six entirely new additional chapters. Whereas the original edition of the novel contains 13 chapters, the revised edition of the novel contains 20 chapters. The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Dorian is selected for his remarkable physical beauty, and Basil becomes strongly infatuated with Dorian, believing that his beauty is responsible for a new mode of art. Talking in Basil's garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only thing worth pursuing in life is beauty, and the fulfillment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, wishing that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, subsequently plunging him into a sequence of debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, each sin being displayed as a new sign of aging on the portrait. The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered one of the last works of classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It deals with the artistic movement of the decadents, and homosexuality, both of which caused some controversy when the book was first published. However, in modern times, the book has been referred to as "one of the modern classics of Western literature.

Taylor raynoe

Josephine Cammarano

- I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

Very fun although I read the 1891 version contained and not the 1890 version which we were meant to for class and that caused me to miss a quiz question. Reminded me a lot of Citizen Kane, Gatsby, and Angels Before Man. Some day I hope to go back and read the other version just to compare and contrast but not now. I wonder why everyone pictures Dorian Grey as a brunette considering his consistently restated blondeness. Hm. My only prior knowledge of him was the very terrible movie, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, of which I had many misconceptions such as the idea that he couldn't look at his own portrait without dying. But I don't know why I believe this considering they had Tom Sawyer in London fighting Jekkyl/Hyde for some reason. Though that does seem in character for Sawyer. 

Rachel

This book is an absolute classic when it comes to Gothic literature. This book teaches you the cruel side of vanity and the materalistic desires that follow with it and how vanity, selfishness, and the cruelty that follows with such traits ends up destroying you from the inside. There are parts which one does not expect to happen in this novel and this propels you further to read it more and more. Lastly, this book ends on a very high and a dramatic note giving the reader a very satisfied feeling. 

Aarush Arora

This book is an absolute classic when it comes to Gothic literature. This book teaches you the cruel side of vanity and the materalistic desires that follow with it and how vanity, selfishness, and the cruelty that follows with such traits ends up destroying you from the inside. There are parts which one does not expect to happen in this novel and this propels you further to read it more and more. Lastly, this book ends on a very high and a dramatic note giving the reader a very satisfied feeling. 

Absolute must read without a doubt!

The Portrait of Dorian Gray was first published in 1890 by Oscar Wilde. It's seen as one of the first Gothic horror fiction stories and it was criticized as scandalous and immoral! This is the special Reader's Choice Edition which has been carefully designed for Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde fans for extra easy reading. Plot summary: This classic book is about a young man named Dorian Gray. He is the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward who thinks he is very good looking, with a pure beauty. One thing leads to another and Dorian embraces a new hedonism with Basil and a new group of friends. He begins to believe that the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty, fulfillment of the senses, and pleasures of the flesh... This is an excellent book for yourself and your own library. Or, you can give "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" (Reader's Choice Edition) away as a special gift.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Reader's Choice Edition)

Portrait of Dorian Gray

leer sin mirar intro, increíble experiencia, nueva forma de entender la belleza como arte. no pasaría el test de la mujer pero se nota que ocurre con intención. un beso wilde, muy bueno

Maria

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine. Wilde later revised this edition, making several alterations, and adding new chapters; the amended version was published by Ward, Lock, and Company in April 1891. The title is sometimes rendered incorrectly as The Portrait of Dorian Gray.The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfillment of the senses. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian (whimsically) expresses a desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a work of classic gothic fiction with a strong Faustian theme.Sample text:Chapter 1The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ...

The Picture of Dorian Grey

Greg Talbot

You can't help but wonder if "Dorian Grey" would be better as a theatrical piece. Sure "Dorian Grey" is in book form, and chopped up neatly into chapters, but it has all the markings of a play. The characters, dazzling in their dialogue, feel remote and empty in a way that makes them vessals for a visual story. The dialogue is rich, but largely conversational It's almost like a Dosteysky "Crime and Punishment" without the interior view of the characters. The weaknesses are that details of the main characters are largely absent. And the tone is both bewildering and sobering as we see the protagonist revel in criminal behavior. The swiftness of events and generality of the story, kept it from greatness in my opinion Of course, there is a lot to take awway from this work. There is Lord Henry's wittiness and snobbish egotism. There are so many quotable lines, it's hardly a wonder that Wilde may be more appreciated today than in his lifetime. One aspect that I greatly enjoyed was how Wilde plays with our response to art. You can filter this book with how the characters Lord Henry, Dorian, and Basil relate to this painting, and it's meaning to them. One of the subtleties I enjoyed was how Dorian's viewing of the painting changes, and how it reflects his own insecurities. At first, I had great difficulty getting into this book, because of the generality of the languageand inscrutable characters. I'm not sure that the dark murderous plot really matches with the first half which is more about exploring identity. But there are times (like Chapter 11) where Wilde shinesand writes with such gusto and throws in historical allusions, it really comes across as nothing short of marvelous.

Roy Thomas

Sebastian Fiumara

Retells in comic book format Oscar Wilde's story of an incredibly handsome young man in Victorian England who retains his youthful appearance over the years while his portrait reflects both his age and evil soul as he pursues a life of decadence and corruption.

Tim Pendry

Two sides of Oscar Wilde seem to be in creative tension in this classic horror tale - the showman literary extrovert, the man who launders witticisms and French literary fashion into British high society, and the moralist 'malgre lui' questioning not art or beauty but high society's ethical compass. The first side is dominant here, perhaps at times to the point of risking tiresomeness as 'bon mot' after 'bon mot' is thrown into the ring to entertain us. Similarly the new decadence of Huysmans 'A Rebours' is translated into English society in a way that can only be called derivative. This is Wilde (1890) before his stunningly witty plays and his fall from grace but after he had proven that he could carry a story. Its importance remains because its scandalous implication of homosexual relationships was brave for the time. It cannot be detached from what happened later. Wilde appears to live behind a mask but, unlike the rest of society, he made the mistake of allowing himself to appear from behind it too obviously. There is one passage where he even appears to predict the conditions for his own downfall in his exposure of how society operates in reality. The book is not as well written or structured as we have often been led to believe. It falters in its exposition at times. However, Wilde is superb at characterisation, creating 'real people' playing their masks within that late Victorian model of high status men caught up in the dark and impossible. We saw this with Jekyll &amp; Hyde and we will see this again with Dracula - men apparently in command of their situation are destabilised by some coded mythic entry of the abnormal: the split personality, the dark side separated into an art object or the vampire. There is no hint of homosexuality in the other two novels, although the first shows us an implicit loneliness behind the mask. The second gives us male bonding against external threats. Wilde's novel allegorises the secret self of one type of Victorian male in a most scandalous manner. The radical cynicism of Lord Henry and the romantic ethic of Basil Hallward might be seen as the two sides of Wilde himself. The first is a fashionable salonista but by aristocratic right whereas Wilde is the man accepted into society only on his epigrams. Lord Henry is stable, Wilde's fame is not. Hallward, who creates a pure beauty that supernaturally reflects goodness and evil, is a shadowier figure who comes to stand for what is right and good and pays the price. Dorian Gray is caught between a superficial 'social truth' and the 'soul' (an aesthetic view of the ethical). Gray is very young when his journey starts out. Indeed, the story should be seen as one of very young men maturing. Gray is impressionable. He adopts the aesthetic of pure beauty but abandons goodness because Lord Henry will not speak for it and Hallward is absent, engrossed in his art. Society (which Lord Henry can aristocratically play like an instrument of which he is a virtuoso) is neither moral nor immoral but amoral. It just 'is' from a position of wealth and authority. Hidden in the text are the seeds of Wilde's very peculiar version of socialism. There are moments when we feel sorry for Gray as the creation of his situation even as we recognise his behaviour to be monstrous. We would consider him a sociopath today. His story raises that hoary old question of whether sociopaths are made or are fated. If made, Lord Henry is in the dock here. So, the infamous picture which torments Gray but insufficiently to have him change his ways, drifts him towards the dark side just as Jekyll is drifted by Hyde into his darkness. The implication is that the good has to be worked at and that a man without internal restraints tends naturally to evil acts. No wonder Bram Stoker later proved useful in taking this late Victorian anxiety, 'othering' the evil so that it was no longer inside the male but outside and so capable of being fought and fought, at that, by a band of brothers. It is the switch from introvert fearful decadence to extrovert late imperial honour. As to the novel, a dispassionate view would note the forced aestheticism and the melodrama but still recognise that Wilde has captured something deeper about the late nineteenth century upper class male condition, made more existential by an underlying male-on-male sexual desire. An innocent could read the book and just see a disturbing horror tale without the gay sub-text but many sophisticated contemporaries could see that sub-text well enough and we can see it today. In his 1895 trial, the book was used as evidence of perversion. Passages from it were read in court. It is the courage of Wilde in attempting to find a way to express his inner self (even if the literary quality has been subsequently exaggerated out of sentiment) that strikes one at the end. It is the people in the novel who matter. There is compassion lurking under the cold wit.

Enthralled by a portrait of himself, young Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to exchange his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Thus he is able to indulge in his desires, as only the portrait bears the traces of his decadence and becomes a nightmarish picture of his soul. Edited with an Introduction by Robert Mighall Preface by Peter Ackroyd

i fucking love this book so much its genuinely the book that got me into classics

THIS BOOK GOES HARD. also, it's basically a Victorian precursor to American Psycho. Love.

Katelyn Caillouet

Excellent book. I heard so much about it before beginning it and I'm happy I finally took the time to read it. Its writing is both aesthetically pleasing and philosophically rich. The story is concise and dynamic with an ever-evolving plotline that keeps you well-engaged while also building on foundational themes. I had some serious reflections and contemplations to reconcile during this reading, but it was a phenomenal experience that I would recommend to most anyone. Highly recommend, 10/10.

Kay so Queso

Joseph Bristow

I reread this book thanks to Sarah Snook blowing me away in Kip Williams' one-actor play adaptation on Broadway, and I am so glad I did. Oscar Wilde's writing is sensual and witty. Its explorations of influence, moral relativism, art, and hedonism are timeless, but I think they are especially relevant in an age where corporatism and social media rule, encouraging us to both indulge and repress ourselves to excess. And, of course, this book is gay as hell...

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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