One of the most famous love affairs in literary history is that of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Bosie Douglas. As a direct consequence of this relationship, Wilde underwent three trials in 1895. In this text, Merlin Holland presents the original transcript of the Wilde versus Queensberry trial.

Oscar Wilde had one of literary history's most explosive love affairs with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. In 1895, Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, delivered a note to the Albemarle Club addressed to "Oscar Wilde posing as sodomite." With Bosie's encouragement, Wilde sued the Marquess for libel. He not only lost but he was tried twice for "gross indecency" and sent to prison with two years' hard labor. With this publication of the uncensored trial transcripts, readers can for the first time in more than a century hear Wilde at his most articulate and brilliant. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde documents an alarmingly swift fall from grace; it is also a supremely moving testament to the right to live, work, and love as one's heart dictates.

This significant collection of essays examines the cultural, literary, philosophical and historical representation of beauty in British, Irish and American literature. Contributors use the works of Charles Dickens, T S Eliot, W H Auden and Stephen Spender among others to explore the role of beauty and its wider implications in art and society.

Concise and illuminating articles explore Oscar Wilde's life and work in the context of the turbulent landscape of his time.

»The Canterville Ghost« is a short story by Oscar Wilde, originally published in 1891. OSCAR WILDE, born in 1854 in Dublin, died in 1900 in Paris, was an Irish prose writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Wilde's significance as a symbol for persecuted homosexuals around the world is immeasurable. Wilde himself was sentenced to prison and hard labour, his works were boycotted, theatrical productions were shut down, and he was publicly vilified. The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890] is his most famous work.

Wilde the writer is known to us from his plays and prose fiction, but apparently it was in his conversation that his genius reached its summit. His talk is lost and his autobiography was never written, but his letters reveal him at his spontaneous, sparkling best.

This is the first book-length study of Forster’s posthumously-published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives in literature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Begun in 1913 and revised over almost fifty years, Maurice became a defining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yet the critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ of Forster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aesthetic contexts for this novel. This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-century debates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory. Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors and contemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster’s friendship with Florence Barger. They close-read the textual variants of Forster’s manuscripts and examine the novel’s genesis and revisions. They consider the volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequent generations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, Alan Hollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory and twenty-first-century online fanfiction writers. What emerges from the volume is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.