The Canterville Ghost

Fülszöveg

Introduction
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He was educated there and at Oxford University. At Oxford, as a poet, he won the most important prize for poetry, and he became a leader of the aesthetic movement. This movement was an answer to the materialism of the nineteenth century - an answer to the importance, for the Victorians, of success and wealth, with very little interest in the arts that appeal to the heart and soul: poetry, painting, good writing, and so on. The aesthetes believed strongly in art for the sake of art, not for its commercial value.
In this collection of short stories we laugh at the ghost's pride in his "performances" as art (The Canterville Ghost, 1891) and at Herr Winckelkopf's "I don't work for money. I live entirely for my art" (the art of explosive inventions, in Lord Arthur Savile's crime, 1891). But real art was not a laughing matter for Oscar Wilde. Even his short stories were constructed with great care as a form of... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Introduction
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. He was educated there and at Oxford University. At Oxford, as a poet, he won the most important prize for poetry, and he became a leader of the aesthetic movement. This movement was an answer to the materialism of the nineteenth century - an answer to the importance, for the Victorians, of success and wealth, with very little interest in the arts that appeal to the heart and soul: poetry, painting, good writing, and so on. The aesthetes believed strongly in art for the sake of art, not for its commercial value.
In this collection of short stories we laugh at the ghost's pride in his "performances" as art (The Canterville Ghost, 1891) and at Herr Winckelkopf's "I don't work for money. I live entirely for my art" (the art of explosive inventions, in Lord Arthur Savile's crime, 1891). But real art was not a laughing matter for Oscar Wilde. Even his short stories were constructed with great care as a form of art.
The characters in the stories are mostly people in "society", the wealthier people among whom Wilde spent much of his time. These are also the characters in his amusing plays, like Lady Windermere's Fan (1982) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The plays seem light-hearted, and they certainly make us laugh, but there is a bite in them, an attack on a society with fixed ideas about behaviour, about right and wrong and the proper position Vissza