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stories we see Wilde developing the parodic style that the plays were to make famous. The stories also reveal his early interest in the devices of melodrama, the ability of paradox to shock the reader and the power of irony to subvert stock literary forms. Most importantly, the stories are also the first expression of Wilde’s preoccupation with the oppositions that were to dominate his life and thought. They include love and desire; art and life; sincerity and insincerity; innocence and sin; honesty and deceit; altruism and greed; self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement. Wilde spent the years between 1889 and 1895, the main creative period of his life, trying to overturn and revalue the basis of these oppositions and the moral and social values which gave them force. In his own life, Wilde tragically failed in this ambition; but the fiction, by contrast and despite the negativism of Macmillan’s anonymous reader, has proved remarkably successful.
Notes to the Introduction
    1 I also print as an appendix one fugitive text by Wilde; see ‘A Note on the Texts’.
    2 The reader’s report survives in the Macmillan archive in the British Library. See Macmillan Add. 5594; 16 Feb. 1888.
    3 The unpublished sequence of letters is housed in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, The University of California at Los Angeles (ALS W67126 W6721: 1894. Sept? 27).
    4 Letter to Ross (
c
1888), also in the Clark Library; published in Ian Small,
Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research
(Greensboro, NC, 1993), p. 45.
    5 Vyvyan Holland,
Time Remembered
(1966), pp. 11 – 12 .
    6 Wilde,
De Profundis
(letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Jan–March. 1897) in
The Letters of Oscar Wilde
, ed. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1963), p. 470.
    7 Ibid. 475.
    8 ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, in
The Oxford Authors: Oscar Wilde
, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford, 1989), p. 573.

Further Reading
Biography
    Richard Ellmann,
Oscar Wilde
(London, 1987).
    Merlin Holland,
The Wilde Album
(1997).
    E. H. Mikhail, ed.,
Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections
2 vols. (London, 1979).
    H. Montgomery Hyde,
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
(London, 1948).
    Richard Pine,
Oscar Wilde
(Dublin, 1983).
Editions
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
, ed. Donald E. Lawler (New York, 1988).
    Lady Windermere’s Fan
, ed. Ian Small (London, 1980).
    A Woman of No Importance
, ed. Ian Small (London, 1993)
    An Ideal Husband
, ed. Russell Jackson (London, 1993).
    The Importance of Being Earnest and Outer Plays
, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Harmondsworth, 2000)
    The Importance of Being Earnest
, ed. Russell Jackson (London, 1980; revd edn, 1993).
    Vera; Or, the Nihilists
, ed. Frances Miriam Reed (Dyfed, 1989).
    Oscar Wilde: Poems and Poems in Prose (The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
, Vol. I), eds. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson (Oxford, 2000).
    Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks
, eds. Philip E. Smith, H, and Michael S. Helfand (New York, 1989).
    Isobel Murray, ed.,
The Oxford Authors: Oscar Wilde
(Oxford, 1989).
    Robert Ross, ed.,
The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde
(London, 1908–22).
Collections of Criticism
    Karl Beckson, ed.,
Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1970).
    Richard Ellmann, ed.,
Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969; repr., 1986). Regenia Gagnier, ed.,
Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde
(New York, 1991).
    Peter Raby, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde
(Cambridge, 1997).
    Willliam Tydeman, ed.,
Wilde: Comedies
(London, 1982).
Criticism
    Karl Beckson,
The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia
(New York, 1998).
    Alan Bird,
The Plays of Oscar Wilde
(London, 1977).
    Regenia Gagnier,
Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public
(London, 1987).
    Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small,
Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century
(Oxford, 2000).
    Norbert Kohl,
Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist