Description

Yale University Press [Published Date: 1994]. Hardcover, 185 pp. First printing, (with full number line). Very good in very good dust jacket. Maroon Paper over Boards with tan cloth on spine. light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Light spotting to top edge of text block and endpaper. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has light bumping to edges and light overall scuffing. Now in an archival-quality Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Includes a 12 page section with black and white illustrations. [From front jacket flap]During his lifetime Oscar Wilde was praised as a brilliant playwright, novelist, and conversationalist and stigmatized as a dangerous seducer of youth. Ironically, he is perhaps best remembered now for the bravery he exhibited in 1895 during his trial in England for homosexual offenses. In the first full-length psychoanalytic biography of Wilde, Melissa Knox explores the link between little-known childhood events and figures in his life and his psychological development to explain both Wilde's creativity and his self-destructive heroism.Drawing on new information as well as on recent biographies and studies, Knox sketches the important characters in Wilde's formative years; an adoring and demanding mother, a father whose scandalous life degraded the family, and a beloved sister who died when Oscar was eleven. She describes Wilde's first daring efforts as a young man to challenge British mores; his lifelong battle with his fears of the syphilis he reportedly contracted at Oxford; his marriage and two children; his tempestuous and flamboyant love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father, the marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of homosexual practices; Wilde's libel suit against the marquess, subsequent trial, and two-year imprisonment; and his last years in exile, disgrace, and ill health.