Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in the city of Dublin, Ireland. He was born into and lived in the prejudiced and etiquette-ridden years of the Late Victorian Age. Actions and language of the individuals were required to conform to rigid rules of behavior and ethic...

Lady Windermere's Fan, A Well Made Play The tradition of the well-made play emerged in the nineteenth century. It was also called "piece bien faite", meaning 'Second Empire Drama'. It was first made popular by the works of Eugene Scribe and Victorien Sardou of France. T...

Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde was born Oscar Finagl O'Flahertie Wills Wilde on October 16, 1854 in the city of Dublin, Ireland. Growing up Wilde was exposed to the literature of the day by listening to talks at his mother's salon. His mother's name was Jane Franceseca Elgee. She wr...

Oscar Wilde Essayist, dramatist, novelist, and poet Oscar Wilde was better known for his scandalous lifestyle than his literary theories and their execution in his dramas. However, subsequent generations have regularly revived his delightful comedies of manners, and now it seems as thou...

In the early 1880s, when aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London, Oscar Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmacu...

Although Oscar Wilde became known as an immoral man as a result of his behaviors and trials, his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, portrays strong morality. Many critics called him "recklessly immoral" (Boilard 3489), and he was labeled as being a deviant homosexual in the late 1800&...

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was an Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and poet. He was part of the Decadence, a loosely affiliated coterie of writers and artists of the 1890s whose lives and works manifested a highly stylized, decorative mann...

"Central to the decadent movement was the view that art is totally opposed to nature, in the sense both of biological nature and of the standard, or natural, norms of morality and sexual behavior" (Abrams, 54). In "The Decay of Lying" Oscar Wilde uses his decadent ideology in a...

In the play an Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde the reader examines a close relationship between political power and social acceptability. Through the interaction of a small group of characters the play embodies broad social and political issues that were occurring during the late 19th century in an Eng...

Wilde's Mockery of Marriage Love is perhaps the most actively sought moral objective of one's life. And though marriage is often thought to be the logical consequence of love, it is Oscar Wilde's conflict in his comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, that love begets bliss and...

One of the most difficult obstacles a playwright has to overcome is finding a way to engage and interest their audience to their piece. Often having to deal with such problems such as boredom, inattentiveness, or just a general lack of interest, playwrights often invent dramatic devices that entic...

Irony is another staple tool of wit in Style acting, and it often seems to come effortlessly to British actors because the British rarely say what they mean. "The speech we hear is an indication of what we don't hear... One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nak...

In Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" there are some major relationships that are created. In each relationship, the partners base their love on some confound, idealized notion of need. Furthermore each couple has a distinct type of language that they share. A perfect ex...

Oscar Wilde is an interesting author and was an intriguing person with his wild habits and outrageous literary works. One such piece is "An Ideal Husband." The characters of this play go about their upper-class lives in such a way that it is both comedic and true. Sir Robert Chiltern is the pictur...

William Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the greatest, if not the greatest, writer in English literature. From historians to middle school students to contemporary authors, just about anyone can tell of his contributions in the literary world. Similarly, Oscar Wilde has done much the same in the fi...

In "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, humor functions through the use of Characterization and the social satire of the Victorian period. Characterization is the method an author uses to reveal or describe characters and their various personalities. Satire is a literary to...

In "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, humor functions through the use of Characterization and the social satire of the Victorian period. Characterization is the method an author uses to reveal or describe characters and their various personalities. Satire is a literary ton...

In "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, humor functions through the use of Characterization and the social satire of the Victorian period. Characterization is the method an author uses to reveal or describe characters and their various personalities. Satire is a literary ton...

A Long Lasting Comedy In today's world we are all exposed to comedy. We see comedy in a variety of ways. These ways include: movies, plays, situational comedies on television, and stand up comedians. However, there is something very different about the typical comedy today compared to ...

The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde became extremely known for his writings in his lifetime and the contreversy behind it. He married and had two sons and enjoyed that life for awhile. Wilde began to be attracted to men and met Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas's father despised Wilde and threa...

In the play "The Importance of Being Earnest," Oscar Wilde introduces to the audience the significance social class bore in Europe at that time. Humorous portrayals of how high-ranking members of society might interact with others from that same social class are found throughout the play. ...

The use of dandyism in "The Importance of Being Earnest" contributes many new aspects to the piece. It can help enhance the mood of the play, the way each character thinks and acts, and how characters interact with one another. Algernon is one such character that displays dandyism, valuing style, ...

Dorian Gray: The Successes and Failures of the 1945 FilmThe Picture of Dorian Gray is a brilliant yet controversial novel in its times for its immoral views. Although the novel is a great one it has taken about a century for many to praise and accept this aspects of the novel. In 1945 the making of ...

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest While some critics contend that The Importance of Being Earnest is completely fanciful and has no relation to the real world, others maintain that Oscar Wilde's trivial comedy for serious people does make significant comments about social clas...

"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." (p. 224) This quotation by Oscar Wilde truly defines the essence of his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Written in 1891, this novel created much controversy due to its implicit homosexual...