This edition of Oscar Wilde's work stresses the range of his achievement in many genres and includes fiction, drama, poems, critical dialogues, poems in prose and aphorisms. It is designed to provide guidance to the wealth of knowledge and allusion upon which his writing stands. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) studied Greek and Latin and was widely read in English, French and American literature; his wide-ranging interests in all the arts inspired much of his work. Through her notes, Isobel Murray enables the modern reader to read Wilde as contemporaries such as Pater, Yeats and Symons read him, in a shared cultural context and for the seriousness of his writing and the astuteness of his criticism. Isobel Murray is editor of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1974) and Wilde's Complete Shorter Fiction (1979).