"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.

Autorentext
Oscar Wilde (18541900) 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.