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Zusatztext "Displays the insight! honesty! and unself-conscious style of a great writer." --W. H. Auden Informationen zum Autor Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer, poet, and playwright. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray , brought him lasting recognition, and he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era with a series of witty social satires, including his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest . Richard Ellmann , during a long and distinguished career, won international recognition as a scholar, teacher of English literature, critic, and biographer. His magisterial life of James Joyce has been widely acclaimed as the greatest literary biography of the century. Ellmann was born in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1918. He studied at Yale and at Trinity College in Dublin. He taught at Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Emory, the University of Chicago, Indiana University, and Oxford, where he was Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College. His James Joyce (National Book Award, 1959) was preceded by Yeats: The Man and the Masks and The Identity of Yeats , and was followed by—among other greatly praised books—two volumes of Joyce letters, Eminent Domain , and Four Dubliners . Ellmann died in May 1987, in Oxford, soon after completing Oscar Wilde , to which he had devoted some two decades of study, research, and writing. Klappentext Written from Wilde's prison cell at Reading Gaol to his friend and lover Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis explodes the conventions of the traditional love letter and offers a scathing indictment of Douglas's behavior, a mournful elegy for Wilde's own lost greatness, and an impassioned plea for reconciliation. At once a bracingly honest account of ruinous attachment and a profound meditation on human suffering, De Profundis is a classic of gay literature. Richard Ellmann calls De Profundis "a love letter...One of the greatest, and the longest, ever written." This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition contains newly commissioned notes. Preface by Richard Ellmann De Profundis is a kind of dramatic monologue, which constantly questions and takes into account the silent recipient´s supposed responses. Given the place where it was written, Wilde might have been expected to confess his guilt. Instead he refuses to admit that his past conduct with young men was guilty, and declares that the laws by which he was condemned were unjust. The closest he comes to the subject of homosexuality is to say, impenitently, that what the paradox was for him in the realm of thought, sexual deviation was in the realm of conduct. More than half of De Profundis is taken up by his confession, not of his own sins, but of Bosie´s. He evokes two striking images for that young man. One is his favorite passage from Agamemnon, about bringing up a lion´s whelp inside one´s house only to have it run amok. Aeschylus compared it to Helen, Wilde to Douglas. The other is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have no realization of Hamlet´s tragedy, being "the little cups that can hold so much and no more." The main theme of self-recrimination is that he did not break with Bosie. But his letter is an attempt to restore relations. And while he admits to "weakness," he explains the weakness as due to his affection, good nature, aversion to scenes, incapacity to bear resentment, and desire to keep life comely by ignoring what he considered trifles. His weakness was strength. The gods, he has discovered, make instruments to plague us out of our virtues as well as our vices. Wilde acknowledges that along with good qualities, he was "the spendthrift of my own genius." But he passes quickly over this defect, and those that attend it. Much of De Profundis is an elegy for lost greatness. As he whips his own image, h...
