Portal:Oscar Wilde
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Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Nature · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology  Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and author of short stories. Known for his barbed wit, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned for two years of hard labour after being convicted of the offence of "gross indecency." Oscar Wilde was the second son born into an Anglo-Irish family, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, to Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Elgee (her pseudonym being Speranza). Jane was a successful writer, being a poet for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and a life-long Irish nationalist. Sir William was Ireland's leading Oto-Ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services to medicine. William also wrote books on archaeology and folklore. He was a renowned philanthropist, and his dispensary for the care of the city's poor, in Lincoln Place at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road.
A House of Pomegranates is a collection of fairy tales, written by Oscar Wilde, that was published as a second collection for The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1892). Wilde said once that this collection was "intended neither for the British child nor the British public." The stories included in this collection are as follows: The Young King, The Birthday of the Infanta, The Fisherman and his Soul and The Star-Child. The stories convey an appreciation for the exotic, the sensual and for masculine beauty. Adolescent male beauty is emphasized, while female beauty is represented dispassionately. Thus they have been seen as intended to transmit a pederastic ethos.[1] The stories also focus on human compassion, the experience of suffering, divine love, and Wilde's own unique take on Christian morals. (more...)  |
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