"Backgrounds" includes essays on Wilde and the 1890s by prominent cultural critics Karl Beckson, Sharon Marcus, and Michael Patrick Gillespie. "Early Reviews and Reactions" collects contemporary responses to The Importance of Being Earnest, including George Bernard Shaw's famous dissenting review and other commentary by H. G. Wells, Hamilton Fyfe, and William Archer.
"Essays in Criticism" includes seven diverse assessments-six of them new to the Second Edition-of Wilde and the play by E. H. Mikhail, Burkhard Niederhoff, Christopher S. Nassaar, Clifton Snider, Brigitte Bastiat, Eibhear Walshe, and Maneck H. Daruwala.
A chronology and selected bibliography are also included.
About the Author :
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. Wilde studied at Trinity College in Dublin and at Magdalen College in Oxford, England, before settling down in London and having a long, successful career as a poet, playwright, and author. Wilde is best known for his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and for his satirical play The Importance of Being Earnest. Michael Patrick Gillespie is Professor of English at Florida International University. He is the author of Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, Branding Oscar Wilde, The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism, Inverted Volumes Improperly Arranged: James Joyce and His Trieste Library, Reading the Book Himself: Narrative Strategies in the Works of James Joyce, The Aesthetics of Chaos, The Myth of an Irish Cinema, James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination, Reading William Kennedy, and Film Appreciation through Genres. His other edited works include the Norton Critical Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest, James Joyce and the Fabrication of an Irish Identity, and Joyce through the Ages: A Non-Linear View.
Review :
"Comes as close to perfection as any comedy I can think of." --Daily Telegraph
"Oscar Wilde's best-known work always had a claim to be the wittiest play in the English language." --Financial Times
"There is a real need for an updated, student-focused edition of this much taught play." --Jenny Stevens, author and series editor
"A fresh new edition of a theatrical favourite that fully evinces the contemporary appeal of Wildean theatre." --Chris Megson, Reader in Drama, Royal Holloway, University of London
"The play isn't going anywhere, and Lucie's expertise and proposed coverage look ideally suited to 'free up' the play from the grip of English Literature study and debate, and give something that Drama teachers can meaningfully engage with." --Matthew Nichols, Head of Drama at Manchester Grammar School, UK
