Oscar Wilde The Importance Of Being Earnest Making Fun Of Victorian Values And Society And Parodying Dramatic Conventions

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1 (A), LMU Munich (Anglistics), course: Advanced Seminar Literature Studies, 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Die Arbeit untersucht, inwieweit Oscar Wildes Stück die Werte des Viktorianischen Zeitalters satirisch beleuchtet und dabei auch mit den damals gängigen dramatischen Konventionen bricht.

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage and the resulting satire of Victorian ways.

Differentiated book- It has a historical context with research of the time-The nineteenth-century French bourgeois drama exerted a powerful influence on Wilde's dramatic works. He often used this convenient formal framework to structure the comedies of his society. By importing a popular and successful French form, he could hide his attack on official order and speech while making the English public laugh at his own values and beliefs. It is also based on the popular forms of melodrama and farce. In doing so, Wilde maintains the appearances of a genre with which the public is familiar, but subverts it with great subtlety. Because he cannot afford to surprise his audience too much and needs success for financial reasons, his attack is not frontal. However, he manages to combine commercial success with conservative audiences while making fun of the conventions for which these audiences are supposed to live. It is done intelligently so that the audience can ignore the subversive policy in the work if they wish. "The medium is the message" and Wilde uses the form to discuss the content. The choice of gender seems to say "beware of appearances," which is one of the themes of the work. It has all the elements of a comedy of manners: the title delivered as a key point for the procedures, the problem of marriage, the founding child, the idea of double life, the style of highly formalized language,

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7 (A-), University of Stuttgart (FB Anglistics), course: Critical Analysis: Comedy, language: English, abstract: "The Importance of Being Earnest" was written by the famous Irish author Oscar Wilde. Wilde was born in 1854 and died of cerebral meningitis in 1900. "The Importance of Being Earnest" was his final and most lasting play - "by all accounts, a masterpiece of modern comedy."1 This play is filled with wit and wisdom, which Wilde himself wrote of it, too. "Well I think, an amusing thing with lots of fun and wit might be made."2 It represents Wilde ́s late -Victorian view of the aristocracy, marriage, wit and social life. The play tells the story of Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff. Both men lead a double life. One in the country and one in the city. Then, they both fall in love, and a series of crises threatens to spoil their romantic pursuits. The main plot line of the play is definitely marriage. "Of course Wilde pokes fun at the institution of marriage, which he saw as a practice surrounded by hypocrisy and absurdity."2 He focuses on the higher class and satirises the life of the English aristocracy. His characters are typical Victorian snobs who are arrogant, overly proper, formal and concerned with money. This essay will provide an outline of the comic effects in this play. How Wilde uses humour, satire, farce and irony. The analysis will show, what makes this comedy so funny and so special. The essay will show some combinations of dialogue, dramatic irony, social criticism, characterisation and exaggeration and it will prove that the dialogues with its puns and epigrams are the basis for the humour in Wilde ́s last play.

After all, who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered? Cannot repentance wipe out an act of folly? Why should there be one law for me and another for women? Wilde's 'trivial play for serious people', a sparkling comedy of manners, is the epitome of wit and style. This brilliantly constructed satire with its celebrated characters and much-quoted dialogue turns accepted ideas inside out and is generally regarded as Wilde's masterpiece. This Methuen Drama Student Edition of the play includes commentary and notes by Lucie Sutherland, Assistant Professor in Drama at the University of Nottingham, UK, which investigate the play through a contemporary lens, bringing in the contributions from queer scholarship and discussions of recent productions of the play.

Provides a collection of critical essays on Wilde's comedic play "The Importance of Being Earnest" arranged in chronological order of publication.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in Paris but it was refused a license for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London. At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials, he was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labor, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, and never returned to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humor and the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most enduringly popular play. After his release from prison, he published the play from exile in Paris, but he wrote no more comic or dramatic works. The Importance of Being Earnest has been revived many times since its premiere. It has been adapted for the cinema on three occasions. In The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), Dame Edith Evans reprised her celebrated interpretation of Lady Bracknell; The Importance of Being Earnest (1992) by Kurt Baker used an all-black cast; and Oliver Parker's The Importance of Being Earnest (2002) incorporated some of Wilde's original material cut during the preparation of the original stage production.

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personæ to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Contemporary reviews all praised the play's humour, though some were cautious about its explicit lack of social messages, while others foresaw the modern consensus that it was the culmination of Wilde's artistic career so far. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most enduringly popular play.