UBC Press The Picture of Dorian Gray book Paperback 210 pages

The existential complexity of Wilde’s novel emerges largely from its uneasy enmeshing of embodied life and fetishized death, of stable and changing selves, clearly anticipating the more Modernist literary experiments with the sentient self in the works of Woolf and Joyce. Transforming an ancient myth of soul-selling and eternal damnation into a moving and unsettling story of human fantasies, fears, retribution and redemption, The Picture of Dorian Gray richly deserves the prized status of a literary classic that it enjoys today. The principal paradox of the novel is dramatised in the danger that emerges out of perfection. The novel shows how absolute beauty is also absolute monstrosity, how the perfect order of artistic creation is also the perfect order of human destruction. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is second only to William Shakespeare as the most quoted writer in history. His best-known works are his plays (The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, etc.) and his only novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray).