The Happy Prince & Other Tales
Autor Oscar Wildeen Limba Engleză Paperback – 28 feb 2009
Toate formatele și edițiile | Preț | Express |
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Paperback (1) | 45.48 lei 6-8 săpt. | |
Serenity Publishers, LLC – 28 feb 2009 | 45.48 lei 6-8 săpt. | |
Hardback (1) | 136.08 lei 3-5 săpt. | +17.76 lei 6-12 zile |
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford – 13 oct 2022 | 136.08 lei 3-5 săpt. | +17.76 lei 6-12 zile |
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 160450658X
Pagini: 68
Dimensiuni: 127 x 203 x 4 mm
Greutate: 0.08 kg
Editura: Serenity Publishers, LLC
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Extras
You are holding in your hands five of those wonderful stories. Perhaps you intend to read them to a child. Perhaps you intend them for a friend, or for yourself. With characteristically vivid prose and playfulness, Wilde’s stories explore timeless themes of good and evil, freedom and responsibility, love and death, beauty and self-sacrifice. The age-old questions they pose are as pertinent now as they were at the turn of the twentieth century, when they were written. What is love? asks ‘The Happy Prince’. How do you get what you want (or at least what you need)? asks ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’. How do you win friends (and avoid alienating people)? asks ‘The Selfish Giant’. Can you have too much compassion? asks ‘The Devoted Friend’. How can you set the world on fire? asks ‘The Remarkable Rocket’. (Answer: by keeping your powder dry.) These aren’t age-restricted questions, of course. They preoccupy adults and children alike. The Happy Prince and Other Stories is ‘meant partly for children’, Wilde said, ‘and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy’.
This was Wilde’s first book of fiction. It bears his unmistakable mark and gestures towards his impressive generic range. It captures the musicality of Poems (1881), as well as the wit and ingenuity he brought to the new genres in which he was working in 1887: the sharp-eyed social commentary of his journalism in ‘The American Invasion’ and ‘The American Man’, the comic sensibility of short stories like ‘The Canterville Ghost’ and ‘The Model Millionaire’, and the seriousness he brought to the Woman’s World as the magazine’s editor. In these works, Wilde shape-shifted from entertainer to analyst and commentator. All of these elements were to come together a year later in The Happy Prince and Other Stories. The book anticipates the truth-telling of his mature essays as well as the paradoxical society comedies that would make him a household name in the 1890s. (…)
Don’t be fooled: although these stories include ogres, princesses and talking objects, you are entering a universe that may be recognizably similar to your own in many respects. The externals may not immediately show it, but the subject here is human nature. It is precisely the relatability and real-world adjacency of the stories’ situations and emotions that make them so appealing. The tales address timeless existential problems. Through humour, irony and symbolism, they go to the heart of the human experience. (…)
Let’s get down on hands and knees, then, and romp around with Wilde. When you get down on all fours, you notice that your viewpoint shifts. Suddenly, you see the world from below. That occasions a change of perspective for your imagination as much as for your eyes. Your new angle of vision prompts a new understanding of your surroundings. Perhaps a table is no longer something to sit at, but something to sit under. Suddenly, the table has new uses: it may become a house, a castle, a fort, a bomb shelter. In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde declared that ‘all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’ Let’s go under the surface, then, and look at the range of shimmering philosophical possibilities they entertain. It is from a similar viewpoint that Wilde’s tales begin: by inviting us to enter a make-believe world that resets our moral compass. In many of these stories, we notice there’s something wrong from the start – there’s a tear in the whole fabric of society, a breach in the social contract. Right and wrong aren’t always easily distinguished from one another. The order of things has been overturned. Love perishes while capitalist and utilitarian concerns flourish.
Cuprins
Illustrations
Introduction
The Happy Prince
The Nightingale and the Rose
The Selfish Giant
The Devoted Friend
The Remarkable Rocket
Descriere
Oscar Wilde's children's stories explore timeless themes of good and evil, freedom and responsibility, love and death, beauty and self-sacrifice.
Featuring princesses, ogres and talking animals, the questions they pose are as pertinent now as they were at the turn of the century. What is love? asks 'The Happy Prince'.
How do you get what you need? asks 'The Nightingale and the Rose'. How do you win friends (and avoid alienating people)? asks 'The Selfish Giant'. Can you have too much compassion? asks 'The Devoted Friend'.
How can you set the world on fire? asks 'The Remarkable Rocket'. Wilde's stories have given pleasure to generations of readers. By turns moving and funny, they gently teach free thinking rather than giving prescriptive lessons.
This beautiful collectors' edition with original watercolour illustrations and decorative motifs from the 1913 edition by Charles Robinson and an introduction by Wilde expert Michele Mendelssohn is certain to surprise and delight adults and children alike.