Built of Books How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde 1st Edition by Thomas Wright ISBN 0805089934 978-0805089936

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Product details: 

ISBN 10: 0805089934 

ISBN 13: 978-0805089936

Author: Thomas Wright

An entirely new kind of biography, Built of Books explores the mind and personality of Oscar Wilde through his taste in books

This intimate account of Oscar Wilde’s life and writings is richer, livelier, and more personal than any book available about the brilliant writer, revealing a man who built himself out of books. His library was his reality, the source of so much that was vital to his life. A reader first, his readerly encounters, out of all of life’s pursuits, are seen to be as significant as his most important relationships with friends, family, or lovers. Wilde’s library, which Thomas Wright spent twenty years reading, provides the intellectual (and emotional) climate at the core of this deeply engaging portrait.

One of the book’s happiest surprises is the story of the author’s adventure reading Wilde’s library. Reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional hero who enters Cervantes’s mind by saturating himself in the culture of sixteenth-century Spain, Wright employs Wilde as his own Virgilian guide to world

literature. We come to understand how reading can be an extremely sensual experience, producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight.

Table of contents: 

PART I

1 ‘Hear the song of Oscar!’
2 ‘The Irish imagination’
3 ‘Words that are winged with light’
4 ‘Soul-forward, headlong’
5 ‘A good book and a good fire’
6 ‘More than real life’
7 ‘At home with Lucien’
8 ‘Minute and critical’
9 ‘How to love Greek things’
10 ‘How to grow’
11 ‘The true liber amoris’
12 ‘The despotism of fact’
13 ‘Such a strange influence’

PART II
The Library

14 ‘Spirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile’
15 ‘Holy of Holies’
16 ‘The falser is the truer’
17 ‘More than usually revolting sentimentality’
18 ‘The vulgar beast’
19 ‘The look of a book’
20 ‘Sensuous and intellectual’
21 ‘Smoke and talk’
22 ‘Mirror of perfect friendship’
23 ‘Touched by other lips’
24 ‘Unseen ideal’
25 ‘Mysterious by this love’
26 ‘The heavy odours of the hothouse’
27 ‘Arry!’
28 ‘Ribald titles’
29 ‘Queensberry rules’

PART III
A Library of Lamentations

30 ‘May I say nothing?’
31 ‘Humanity’s machine’
32 ‘Silence’
33 ‘Books in his hand’
34 ‘The greatest consolation’
35 ‘Words of grace’
36 ‘Dazed with the wonder’
37 ‘Infamous Saint Oscar’
38 ‘There they lie’
39 ‘Interested in others’
40 ‘Rest peaceably’

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Tags: Thomas Wright, Built of Books, How Reading, the Life