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The Importance of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'

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London, 1895. Valentine's Day, surprisingly chilly. (Fog, likely - this IS London.) The empire flourishes under the reign of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria (her accomplishments as related to her gender are the exception, not the rule, as she's one of the first to remind you). Theatre has become a haven for the masses, with commoners on benches down in the house and the titled upper classes in box seats above. A new play is on offer tonight, and seems promising. The playwright has been making quite a name for himself - this is his fourth new work in the past three years, with the third enjoying a month-long run at another theater just down the street. He's very clever, the author, though there are rumors of scandalous behaviors that crop up now and then. Surely nothing with which respectable denizens of the city should concern themselves. The audience has settled, and the lights are dimmed at last. The curtain rises on Oscar Wilde's newest work, The Importance of Bein...
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The Play's the Thing

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'No great artist sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.' So spoke Oscar Wilde, a prominent representative of the Aesthetics movement and defender of the 'art for art's sake' philosophy. Aesthetics embraced this idea as a response to utilitarian social philosophies and the ugliness and practicality that was symptomatic of the Industrial age, there near the end of the Victorian era. 'Art for art's sake' declares that art has no function other than to exist as a representation of the artist's self-expression - it just IS. Art can and should exist only as art; it has no moral justification, no responsibility to teach. (There's a related concept from the Greek thinkers: that something is 'autotelic', or 'complete in itself'.) Critics of the movement insist that art must attempt to communicate something, to connect individuals if it is to have any value, and that 'pure art' solidifies the ...
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