Autorentext

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is canonical by several routes at once: as the wittiest playwright of the Victorian stage (The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan), as a novelist (The Picture of Dorian Gray), and as one of the era's most quoted essayists and epigrammatists. "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891) is less familiar than the plays but belongs beside them on any complete Wilde shelf: it is his fullest statement of political philosophy, arguing that art and individual selfhood require freedom from both grinding poverty and the pressure to conform, and that socialism's real value is what it might do for individualism rather than for the state. The essay cannot be read apart from what happened to its author four years later. In 1895 Wilde was convicted of "gross indecency" under British law criminalizing sex between men, and served two years' hard labor, an ordeal that broke his health and effectively ended his career; he died in exile and poverty at forty-six. "The Soul of Man under Socialism" argues, in 1891, that a just society is one that lets the individual live according to his own nature without punishment or shame - a position Wilde would shortly pay for in his own body. Few essays in English have been so precisely vindicated by their author's later persecution, which makes this a founding document of arguments for personal liberty that Wilde himself was never permitted to enjoy. Read now, it is Wilde at his most serious without losing his epigrammatic edge - the prose is aphoristic and quotable even when the argument is dead earnest, which keeps it moving for readers who know him only from the plays. It belongs on shelves supporting LGBTQ+ history, political philosophy, and Victorian studies alike, not just literature. This Clearview Editions large-print printing - 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, ragged-right, undivided words - opens a text usually encountered only in cramped anthology type to readers who need larger, cleaner type to read it at all.

Klappentext

The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde, originally published 1891. Wilde's case that socialism's real promise isn't economic equality but individual freedom from the tyranny of poverty and convention. This is a Liftable Edition: Clearview caps paper-plus-binding weight at 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) for every Liftable title, so it stays comfortable to hold and read for extended periods -- a physical accessibility standard most large-print publishers do not set at all. Part of Large Print for Lefties: Public-domain titles selected for readers drawn to unorthodox, dissenting, and left-of-center political and social thought, from manifestos to utopian fiction. This series is aimed at readers who want their politics and their reading comfort met at once, rather than hunting separately for large-print editions of radical classics. For collection development: this is a large-print edition intended for low-vision and aging patrons, and for any reader who finds standard trade print tiring over a long sitting. It suits large-print and accessibility collections, adult and young-adult general collections where the text is a standard, and reading-room copies where a durable case binding matters. Each volume is held under 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of paper and binding, so it can be read at a table or in a lap without a stand. The text is unabridged and reproduced from a public-domain source without modernisation. Algorithmic Quality Assurance: this edition was checked by 123 deterministic tests covering typography, pagination, colour, cover geometry and metadata, then read by frontier language models for semantic review and holistic evaluation. What was checked, and what those results do and do not mean, is explained in the back of the book. This Clearview Editions hardcover is built on a production standard that significantly exceeds the industry norm for large-print publishing. The body text is set at 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next on 27-point leading, 1.5 line spacing --- the minimum WCAG 2.2 Level AAA Success Criterion 1.4.8 sets for a block of text, and the figure UKAAF's large-print guidance gives as well. The leading North American large-print hardcover imprints typically set their body text at 16 point, and most large-print trade paperbacks release at 14 to 16 point. At 18 point, Clearview Editions offers text that is measurably larger than every other major large-print publisher, specifically for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or any visual condition that makes standard trade print frustrating or impossible to read for long stretches. The trim size is equally generous. Clearview Editions is printed on a 7x10-inch page, substantially larger than the 6x9 hardcover that is standard in the large-print industry and roughly 50 percent larger by area than the 5x8 trade paperback trim most legacy large-print paperback imprints use. The extra page area is deliberate: it allows the 18-point body to set at the 50-to-55 character line length that reading-fatigue research identifies as optimal, without the narrow text columns and cramped margins that plague smaller-trim large-print books. The body font, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, was developed by the Braille Institute of America specifically to maximize letter recognition for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, and visual processing differences. It distinguishes between commonly-confused letter pairs - lowercase l versus uppercase I, the digit 0 versus uppercase O, b versus d, p versus q - using distinctive shape features that preserve readability even under eye strain.