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Hello in February 1895 Oscar Wilde was at the height of his powers

He was known on both sides of Atlantic

He was fated in the London society and celebrated in the West End were an ideal husband continued to play to packed houses as

The importance of being earnest open to ecstatic reviews

Quote the man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world on quote

He's reputed to have said and he seemed on course to do just that

But in April of that year he was arrested for the crime of gross indecency and his swift descent from omnipotence began

It ended five years later when exiled and humiliated he died famously beyond his means in a Paris hotel

Wilde's reputations meant a long time in the wilderness

But just over a century after his death his stalk is probably higher than ever before

Now that this rehabilitation seems complete how should we understand his legacy was wilder reactionary the last of the Romantics

Or was he the midwife to modernism was there a coherent philosophy behind those beguiling epigrams

Or was the little more to his asceticism than dressing up all as Windom Lewis bitterly put it exercising his

One trick of reversing conventional morality without saying anything very interesting about it

With me to discuss us go out in the east seats is Valentine Cunningham professor of English language and literature at Oxford University

Regina Garnier professor of English at the University of Exeter and Neil Sammels dean of humanities at Bathsby University and author a

Wilde styled

Valentine Cunningham could you set the scene for us Oscar Wilde's most famous of his group

But who are his contemporaries in the eighties and nineties who are the Eastheets and how did they come together?

I suppose

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