For nearly a century, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) has been seen primarily as a "British" writer - a description that ignores his Irish parentage and the experience of the first 20 years of his life. In this study, 17 leading Irish artists, critics and cultural commentators explore the theme of Wilde's Irishness. Viewing Wilde from a range of angles, the contributors assess what difference it makes to perceive him as Irish, or Anglo-Irish, rather than as a British writer. The intention is to restore the author to his native context and to the cultural inheritance of an Irishman who spent much of his life in England. In its first section, the book presents a sequence of critical essays by such Irish writers, critics and commentators as Declan Kiberd, Angela Bourke, Bernard O'Donoghue and Fintan O'Toole. The second section aims to give some indication of the creative response to Wilde by some of Ireland's artists: among them poets, playwrights, sculptors, a short story writer and an actor. The book closes with Seamus Heaney's dedication of the Wilde window at Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey. While the contributors to this volume reach a consensus about the essential Irishness of Wilde, they subvert the categories in which Wilde generally has been placed and highlight the difficulties of evaluating him within a cultural context. The book sets Wilde within the tradition of other Irish writers, including Joyce, Beckett, Shaw and Yeats - a tradition from which he has been previously excluded - and restores him to his place as an Irish writer of distinction.