This comprehensive collection showcases Oscar Wilde's brilliant
storytelling skills and his amazing stylistic versatility, ranging from
fairy tales and ghost stories to detective yarns and comedies of
manners. It includes the complete texts of The Happy Prince and Other
Tales, A House of Pomegranates, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other
Stories, Poems in Prose, and the critical essay The Portrait of Mr. W.
H.
Originally published in the late 1880s and early 1890s, these tales
predate Wilde's fame as a dramatist. When he wrote them, he was best
known among fashionable London society as a drawing-room raconteur. Many
of the character types now familiar from his comedies first emerged in
these stories, along with his gifted uses of parody, melodrama, paradox,
and irony. Even more significantly, they reflect the author's
preoccupation with opposites -- idealistic love and desire, art and
life, sincerity and artifice, innocence and sin, altruism and greed, and
honesty and deceit -- offering captivating expressions of the themes
that dominated Wilde's life and thought.