Skip to main content Skip to Search Box
Listen
Email

Topic Pages contain an overview, definitions, biographies, related topics, images, plus links to relevant articles and other content provided by your library. Topic Page: Picture of Dorian Gray

Definition: Picture of Dorian Gray, The from The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide

Novel (1891) by Oscar Wilde. An artist paints a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man described as flawless in beauty and character. The picture has the uncanny quality of registering the signs of age and accelerating moral decline of its subject while Gray himself apparently stays forever young and angelic. Although melodramatic in plot and lush in descriptive style, the story contains much of Wilde's paradoxical wit in its dialogue.

weblinks

Picture of Dorian Gray

Summary Article: Picture of Dorian Gray, The
from The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English

A novel by Oscar Wilde, serialized by Lippincott's Magazine in 1890 and expanded in book form the same year. Once regarded as daringly modern in its portrayal of fin-de-siácle decadence, it draws on traditional motifs to create a powerful Gothic novel. In an updated version of the Faust story, Dorian sells his soul to keep his youth and beauty. The tempter is Lord Henry Wotton, who lives selfishly for amoral pleasure; Dorian's good angel or conscience is Basil Hallward, the portrait painter, whom Dorian murders. The book highlights the tension between the polished surface of high life and the life of secret vice. Although sin is punished in the end, the book has a strong flavour of the elegantly perverse. The preface asserts: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’

"Picture of Dorian Gray, The." In The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, edited by Ian Ousby. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2000. https://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/picture_of_dorian_gray
Picture of Dorian Gray, the. (2000). In I. Ousby (Ed.), The Cambridge guide to literature in English. (2nd ed.). [Online]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available from: https://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/picture_of_dorian_gray [Accessed 24 May 2019].
"Picture of Dorian Gray, The." The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, edited by Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2000. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/picture_of_dorian_gray. Accessed 24 May 2019.
The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, © Cambridge University Press 2000

Related Articles

Full text Article Picture of Dorian Gray, The (1890)
The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature

A novel by Oscar Wilde which updates Goethe 's Faust legend. Tempted by the selfish sybarite Henry Wotton, Dorian trades his soul...

Full text Article Gray, Dorian
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

A person whose physical appearance seems to be unaltered by the passage of time. The allusion is to the central figure in Oscar Wilde's novel The Pi

Full text Article Gloria Grahame
Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins

Gloria Hallward (1923-1981), U.S. stage, movie actress, of Eng. descent. The actress's new surname was the professional name of her mother, Jean McD

See more from Credo