Mateiu Caragiale and Oscar Wilde represent the extremes of Decadence both starting from the
French model and instilling their own specific features. The legacy of Caragiale is that of the
Eastern variant of the dandy with a strong Balkanic oriental influence while Wilde
represents the Western one a mixture of Irish and English cultures. As two important texts of
world literature »Craii de Curtea-Veche« and »The Picture of Dorian Gray« prove their value
not only through the adherence to Decadence as a literary and cultural paradigm of the fin de
siècle but also through their particularities through the specificity they bring arising
from two different cultural spaces. Negativity decay ruin mixed with aestheticism
artificiality and sophistication are the two main lines that dissolve in the aesthetics of the
two Decadence novels rooted in Romanticism and announcing Modernism.
