A Critic in Pall Mall: Beings Extracts From Reviews and Miscellanies.

WILDE, Oscar. Selected by E. V. Lucas.

$125.00

Item Number: 139580

London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1919.

First edition of this selection of Wilde’s literary criticism. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth. In near fine condition. Ownership inscription.

Wilde’s “theme is not, as is often supposed, art’s divorce from life, but its inescapable arraignment by experience. His creative works almost always end in unmasking. The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes an admonitory finger. While the ultimate virtue in Wilde’s essays is in make-believe, the denouement of his dramas and narratives is that masks have to go. We must acknowledge what we are. Wilde at least was keen to do so. Though he offered himself as the apostle of pleasure, his created world contains much pain” (Ellmann, xvi). Wilde's A Critic in Pall Mall contains extracts from his critical works on Keats, Shakespeare, Balzac, Aristotle, early Christian art in Ireland, Y.B. Years, and William Morris among a wide variety of other subjects.