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 having a hard childhood, where he was dressed as a girl until the age of nine, he viewed life more critically than others. He often focused in on the upper class, and wrote of their absurdity, superficiality, and snobbery. Yet mainly, he wrote of what he felt at the time and what is around him. In The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance, it is evident that the environment, lifestyle, and events in the life of Oscar Wilde has influenced him in writing such one-sided critical satires, in which he reserved none of his strong opinions.

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

Wilde had a colorful and scandalous social life, and was even jailed for a while. He believed that people should be self-expressive vs. self-repressive, and therefore never held anything back. "What is termed sin is an essential element of progress . . . without it, the world would stagnate or grow old or become colorless" (Bloom 101). Wilde found criticism and self-consciousness necessary as sin. He believed that criticism plays a vital role in the creative process, and that criticism is an independent branch of literature with its own procedures (91). "Wilde was one of the first to see that the exaltation of the artist required a concomitant exaltation of the critic. If art was to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it" (90).

Wilde stated that: "If we are all insincere, masked, a

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Approximate Word count = 717
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)