Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde Essayist, dramatist, novelist, and poet Oscar Wilde was better known for his scandalous lifestyle than his literary theories and their execution in his dramas. However, subsequent generations have regularly revived his delightful comedies of manners, and now it seems as though his work will survive his notoriety. (Twentieth Century Literary Criticism) Literary critics were often unenthusiastic, or even hostile, toward his works, finding them to be overly contrived or recklessly immoral. (Critical Survey …

…in general is that the attempt to heal the split between a mans dreams of being innocent and his fact of guilt was ultimately fatal, the quest for wholeness, self-destructive. It was Wilde’s unending dilemma that he could never bring himself to forsake either purity or humanity, and thus was forced into the ontological position of the androgyny, trapped between the two worlds and unable to live comfortably in either. (Chris Snodgrass in Criticism:108)