Editing The Importance of Being Earnest (section)

===Structure and genre===
The novelist and critic [[Arthur Ransome]] argued that Wilde freed himself by abandoning the [[melodrama]] of his earlier drawing room plays and basing the story entirely on the Earnest/Ernest verbal conceit. Freed from "living up to any drama more serious than conversation", Wilde could now amuse himself to a fuller extent with "quips, {{lang|fr|bons mots|italic=no}}, epigrams and repartee that had really nothing to do with the business at hand".<ref>Ransome, p. 136</ref> The academic [[Sos Eltis]] comments that although Wilde's earliest and longest handwritten drafts of the play are full of "farcical accidents, broad puns and a number of familiar comic devices",<ref>Eltis, p. 175</ref> in his revisions "Wilde transformed standard nonsense into the more systematic and disconcerting illogicality which characterizes ''Earnest's'' dialogue".<ref name=Eltis177>Eltis, p. 177</ref>

The genre of the ''Importance of Being Earnest'' has been debated by scholars and critics, who have variously categorised it as [[high comedy]], farce, parody and satire. In a 1956 critique Richard Foster argues that the play creates "an 'as if' world in which 'real' values are inverted, reason and unreason are interchanged and the probable defined by improbability".<ref>Foster, pp. 19–20</ref> Contributors to ''The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde'' (1997) variously refer to the play as "high farce",<ref>Raby (1997), p. 18</ref> "an ostensible farce",<ref>Raby (1997), p. 159</ref> "farce with aggressive pranks, quick-paced action and evasion of moral responsibility",<ref name="Jackson 1997, p. 173">Jackson (1997), p. 173</ref> and "high comedy".<ref>Cave, p. 227</ref>