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Focusing on the last quarter of the nineteenth century, The Wilde Years features Oscar Wilde as a central, catalytic figure linking two artistic capitals, London and Paris. Wilde is presented as a multi-faceted artist, whose major achievement was language, with which he contributed to the development of artistic and cultural movements of his age. In his lifetime, Wilde was praised as a poet, writer, and, in particular, playwright, but this publication throws new light on his lesser-known work as an art critic, journalist and progressive political thinker. The book is a tribute to the man who, in his own words, 'stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.'Celebrated for his wit and flamboyant personality, Oscar Wilde was a central figure in the artistic worlds of fin-de-siecle London and Paris. He was a poet, playwright, art critic and, above all, he was known as a virtuoso 'conversationalist.' Furthermore, the extremity of his fate - imprisonment following his trials in 1895 for homosexual activities - made his name unforgettable as a 'martyr' of the time.