Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and Other Tales is a collection of stories for children each of which is so poignant and exquisite that they are as treasured by adults as they are by children. The stories included in this collection are The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend and The Remarkable Rocket.
Lady Windermere's Fan: A Play About a Good Woman is a play by Oscar Wilde, who uses his sharp wit to satirize Victorian ideals about marriage. Lady Windemere suspects her husband of infidelity and retaliates by taking a lover. Her husband's suspected lover follows her, begging her to return to Lord Windemere. The lover sacrifices her own reputation for that of Lady Windemere, in order to save that lady's marriage.
In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor as punishment for having engaged in homosexual acts. While serving out his sentence at Reading Gaol in Berkshire, Wilde witnessed the execution by hanging of a young soldier who had murdered his wife by slashing her throat. Profoundly shaken by the execution and the crime that preceded it, Wilde composed this elegiac poem centered on the haunting refrain, "Yet each man kills the thing
...The Soul of Man under Socialism is an 1891 essay by Oscar Wilde. Wilde puts forth the argument that within a capitalist system "the majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them" - that the necessity of solving the problems that capitalism creates draws away the talent that could otherwise be used to fulfill one's potential. In taking the the cause of this away, "Socialism
...While Oscar Wilde is now strongly associated with the tone of whimsy that imbues his breezy, effortlessly witty epigrams and essays, the Irish writer and playwright was also a serious thinker who, having been sentenced to two years of hard labor as a punishment for his homosexuality, was deeply engaged with the social issues of his day. This essay, penned as a letter to a newspaper soon after Wilde's release from prison, takes up the moral issue
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