Marsha Lien Miss Lynch 11 English H June 7, 1999 Oscar Wilde and the World Around Him Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was an Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and poet. He was part of the Decadence, a loosely affiliated coterie of writers and artists of the 1890s whose lives and works manifested a highly stylized, decorative manner, a fascination with morbidity and perversity, and an adherence to the doctrine "art for art's sake." After …showed first 75 words of 674 total…

…showed last 75 words of 674 total…at their peril" (Schmidgall 149). What Wilde was trying to express is that art is so real, that if one dares to go beneath the surface, one may find things that he/she does not want to find. Wilde loved children, and loved the youth. Wilde proposed to speak for the young, with even excessive eagerness at times. Both The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance mainly evolves around the youthful characters