Readings Classics: The Importance of Being Earnest

Description

The Importance of Being Earnest shows a full measure of Oscar Wilde’s legendary wit, and embodies more than any of his other plays his decency and warmth.

A selection of Oscar Wilde’s best and most important plays – sharp, relevant and brilliant to this day.

The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the most enduringly popular of British comic dramas, and a mainstay of English literature and drama courses at college and university level. This is an ideal edition for students with on-page notes to help clarify meaning, and a completely new introduction. In the new introduction, Francesca Coppa explores recent critical approaches to the play, including queer and postcolonial readings, as well as giving the context in which the play was written and how it relates to Wilde’s personal life and public persona. The introduction also discusses the play’s stage history, providing students with an ideal overview of the play and its resonances for contemporary audiences.

Author Biography

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer, playwright, poet and essayist. He spent most of his life in London where he was a most famous writer and socialite in the late Victorian Age. He was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. He later lived in London and married Constance Lloyd there in 1884. Wilde was a leader of the Aesthetic Movement. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in Lippincotts Monthly Magazine in 1890. He published a revised and expanded edition in 1891 in response to negative reviews which criticised the books immorality.

Wilde became famous through of the immense success of his plays such as Lady Windemeres Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In 1985, after a public scandal involving Wildes relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was sentenced to two years hard labour in Reading Gaol for gross indecency. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was based on his experiences in prison and was published in 1898. After his release, Wilde never lived in England again and died in Paris on 30 November 1900. He is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery.