The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Wilde, Oscar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140436065 ISBN 13: 9780140436068

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2000

Synopsis

Lady Windermere's Fan/Salomé/A Woman of No Importance/An Ideal Husband/A Florentine Tragedy/The Importance of Being Earnest

'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness'

The Importance of Being Earnest is a glorious comedy of mistaken identity, which ridicules codes of propriety and etiquette. Snobbery and hypocrisy are also laid bare in Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, while in Salomé and A Florentine Tragedy, Wilde uses historical settings to explore the complex relationship between sex and power. The range of these plays displays Wilde's delight in artifice, masks and disguises, and reveals the pretensions of the social world in which he himself played such a dazzling and precarious part.

Edited with Introduction, Commentaries and Notes by Richard Allen Cave

About this title

About the Author

Born in Ireland, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was educated in Dublin & Oxford and went on to become the leading and most prominent exponent of flamboyant aestheticism. As well as his many plays, he wrote one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and published several volumes of poetry and criticism. He was imprisoned in 1895 for homosexual offences and after his release he died in exile in Paris. Richard Cave has edited a selection of Yeats' plays for Penguin Classics.

From the Back Cover

Lady Windermere's Fan/Salomé/A Woman of No Importance/An Ideal Husband/A Florentine Tragedy/The Importance of Being Earnest

'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness'

The Importance of Being Earnest is a glorious comedy of mistaken identity, which ridicules codes of propriety and etiquette. Snobbery and hypocrisy are also laid bare in Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, while in Salomé and A Florentine Tragedy, Wilde uses historical settings to explore the complex relationship between sex and power. The range of these plays displays Wilde's delight in artifice, masks and disguises, and reveals the pretensions of the social world in which he himself played such a dazzling and precarious part.

Edited with Introduction, Commentaries and Notes by Richard Allen Cave

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140436065
• ISBN 13: 9780140436068
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464
• Editor: Cave Richard