Study Of Oscar Wilde Comedy

Oscar Wilde's outstanding comedies broke the silence of the British stage in the 19th century, bringing up a British theatrical revival and making his greatest contribution to British literature. Although Wilde is a well-known aesthetic theorist, his comedies are not his practice of his aesthetic notion. While revealing the contradictions between Oscar Wilde's comedies and his aestheticism, the present dissertation focuses on Oscar Wilde's writing psychology and cultural meanings from the social-cultural point of view, and through an analysis of the characters, the language and the art of plot structures in his comedies the dissertation expounds Wilde's ideological contents and artistic characteristics.The dissertation is divided into five parts.The first part discusses the rise and fall of the aestheticism and its characteristics in Britain and analyses the utopian nature of "art for art's sake", the principle of aestheticism, pointing out that as an artistic form, the comedy simply cannot carry out the artistic spirit of aestheticism. Taking into consideration the increasingly popular influence of the consumer culture on Wilde's comedy writing in his time, the dissertation presents a further exposition on the contradictions between Oscar Wilde's comedies and aestheticism, believing that from the play writing to the performance of the Oscar Wilde's comedies, he had been completely subject to the market operation mechanism, which put a heavy commercial color onto his writings. This runs counter to aestheticism initiated by himself. The fusion of the creation and spreading of Oscar Wilde's comedies with commerce shows that Oscar Wilde is just a playwright for the market. His aestheticism utopia had completely disappeared in the operation of his comedy business.The second part deals with the characters in Oscar Wilde's comedies. First, it discusses the figures in the original study and its significance when considering the creation of the Western comedy theory and the macro inspection. Second, standing in the popular consumer culture in the late Victorian time, from the author and the characters, works and characters, audience and figures, the dissertation expounds the personal characteristics as playboys in Wilde's comedy as well as its artistic value and cultural implication. Finally, the article analyses the women in his comedies in a thorough and systematic way after examining the cultural background and Wilde's ideas in his creation, pointing out that by creating different woman images, Wilde's comedy reflects the point of view of the middle class on women and family ideology in the Victorian era and questions the traditional moral doctrine and the double standard of morality which was different for men and women , and it also expresses the theme of his comedies calling for tolerance.The third part analyzes the Oscar Wilde's comedy language by focusing on the characteristics of his language and its artistic charm from the wording features, paradox and dialogues between characters. From the perspectives of social awareness of the Victorian era, the audience appreciation level, cultural psychology, Wilde's Irish identity and his individuality, the dissertation explores the causes of the language characteristics'formation and the relations between the language in Oscar Wilde's comedy and the mainstream social ideology in the Victorian era, revealing Oscar Wilde's comedy wisdom.The fourth part discusses Wilde's skills in plot structure through an analysis of his skills in using props, setting suspense and embedding problems discussion and reveals Oscar Wilde's inheritance and innovation in his comedies.In Conclusion, the dissertation sums up the aesthetic characteristics in his comedies and their position and influence in the history of the British and world drama, concluding that Wilde is a great playwright with his particular style in the history of British drama, and his comedies will be enjoyed by people of all times.