The phrase may be considered synonymous with anti-mimesis, the direct opposite of Aristotelian mimesis: art imitating real life.
[1] McGrath places the antimimetic philosophy in a tradition of Irish writing, including Wilde and writers such as Synge and Joyce in a group that "elevate blarney (in the form of linguistic idealism) to aesthetic and philosophical distinction", noting that Terry Eagleton observes an even longer tradition that stretches "as far back in Irish thought as the ninth-century theology of John Scottus Eriugena" and "the fantastic hyperbole of the ancient sagas".
Wilde's antimimetic idealism, specifically, McGrath describes being part of the late nineteenth century debate between Romanticism and Realism.
[3] In George Bernard Shaw's preface to Three Plays he wrote, "I have noticed that when a certain type of feature appears in painting and is admired as beautiful, it presently becomes common in nature; so that the Beatrices and Francescas in the picture galleries of one generation come to life as the parlor-maids and waitresses of the next."
He stated that he created the aristocratic characters in Cashel Byron's Profession as unrealistically priggish even without his later understanding that "the real world does not exist... men and women are made by their own fancies in the image of the imaginary creatures in my youthful fictions, only much stupider."