GREAT BOOKS 33: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, with Nicholas Frankel (Virginia Commonwealth University)

<p>Oscar Wilde's <a href= "https://warblerpress.com/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/"><em>The Picture of Dorian Gray</em></a> was the novel that scandalized, challenged, and inspired Victorian England with its tale of a beautiful young man who trades his soul, captured in a portrait, for eternal youth. Dorian wants to experience life fully, and the book became evidence in the trial where Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for "gross indecency" - his love for other men. Wilde had been the consummate celebrity, famous for his plays, especially the sublime <em>The Importance of Being Earnest</em> and <em>Lady Windermere's Fan</em>, but also as a public speaker who had entertained and charmed audiences during an American tour. After his prison term Wilde left England for exile in France.</p> <p>It was not only Wilde on trial, but also literature itself. British society decided was that a book can corrupt, that gay love must be outlawed, and that censorship, repression and propriety must supplant freedom of the imagination, of literature, of love.</p> <p>Martyr, scapegoat, crusader for LGBTQ rights - that was my understanding of Wilde when I recently edited a small book of <a href="https://warblerpress.com/wilde-on-love/">Wilde on Love</a>. To correct my image of Wilde as utterly crushed and destroyed by his trial, I spoke with one of the world's foremost Wilde experts: Professor Nicholas Frankel of Virginia Commonwealth University, a graduate of Oxford, the University of Southern California, and the University of Virginia. Professor Frankel has edited new and uncensored editions of <em><a href= "https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066311">The Picture of Dorian Gray</a></em>, of <em><a href= "https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674048980">The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest</a></em>, and of his prison writings. His expansive and gripping biography, <em><a href= "https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737945">Oscar Wilde; The Unrepentant Years</a></em>, provides a