Author Description

This, the first publication of Oscar Wilde's Commonplace Book and Notebook, which he kept during his middle twenties at the end of his studies at Oxford, will forever alter critical perceptions of Wilde's achievement in the larger tradition of English critical and aesthetic thought. Not merely the dandy and aesthete of modernist myth, Wilde was also a precocious and widely-read Victorian humanist. These documents, containing the records of his education and reading--quotations and paraphrases of other writers, and Wilde's own analytical and descriptive jottings, comments, and fragmentary drafts--reveal how Wilde developed the synthesis of Hegelian idealism and Spencerian evolutionary theory that was to be a mainstay of his major critical and creative works. In addition, the editors provide a physical description of the manuscripts; historical evidence for dating; an introduction that describes the intellectual influence of Wilde's parents and their circle in Dublin; and a commentary that identifies the sources in the notebooks and substantially reinterprets Wilde's criticism and fiction.