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In the West, studies on Oscar Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest can be pided into three periods. The first period initiated from 1892 when Wilde’s first comedy was performed on stage, to 1899, one year before he died. During this period, Wilde reached the peak of popularity with his four social comedies and then experienced the downfall. In The Speaker, A. B. Walkley admired the play and considered it as the culmination of Wilde’s dramatic career. He said “it is of nonsense all compact, and better nonsense, I think, our stage has not seen” (Bechson, 1970:196). On the contrary, George Bernard Shaw, a famous playwright of the same time, said in Saturday Review, “I cannot say that I greatly cared for The Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me, of course; but unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theater to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it” (Bechson, 1970:195). The second period ranged from 1900 to 1969, characterized by the emergence of Oscar Wilde’s biography and textual analysis on his works. The third period started from 1970. There was a climax in Wilde studies in the literary and art circles. Works like Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage by Karl Beckson (1970), Wilde: Comedies by William Tydeman (1982) and Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann (1988) are all outstanding researches and works which make great contributions to the further study. Furthermore, more and more studies shifted the focus to the close relationships between art and the social and historical environment. Bernadette Wonner in his seminar paper Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest (2003) stated that in this play Oscar Wilde made fun of Victorian values, especially about marriage and morality.
Compared with the West, studies on Oscar Wilde and his works in China are much later and thinner, which can be pided into two periods. In the early twentieth century, Wilde’s plays were translated and introduced into China, however, there was little study about them. The only essay Wilde and the Plays written by Gong Siwen focusing on Wilde’s four comedies stated that “he successfully seized the times and people’s minds” (1933). The second period began in the 1980s when the Wilde study flourished again. Chinese scholar Li Yuan said “In The Importance of Being Earnest, the most successful social comedy, Oscar Wilde, with determined subversion of the late Victorian Bourgeois culture and ideology, attacks the fixed norms of identity, marriage and gender in his time and construct a carnivalized world full of dandies, his ideal embodiment of ascetic expression”(2008).