Early Criticism
Literary criticism towards The Importance of Being Earnest did not begin to appear until well into the mid twentieth century, at which time critics were chiefly interested in the play’s satirical, comical and parodic elements. Writing in 1956, Otto Reinert examined satirical strategies employed in The Importance of Being Earnest, explaining how Oscar Wilde’s “farce” (Reinhert 14) maintained its satire without descending into “bitter criticism” (17). 
This ability, Reinert determined, was largely due to the play being “all farce” (or “one sustained metaphor”), which was contrasted starkly with a “non-farcical reality…kept
strictly outside the play” (15). He further observed that in order to accomplish this, Wilde’s characters conformed to an inverted code of satire, in which each was oblivious to the farce in which they were involved, and instead acted their parts with all due seriousness (15). Reinert’s analysis is a prime example of the early criticism of The Importance of Being Earnest as a satire, and though it is unclear why such commentary did not begin until decades into the twentieth century, there is likely some correlation to the scandal associated with Wilde’s name.
Modernist Criticism
By the 1970s, criticism had begun to lean towards analysing The Importance of Being Earnest through a modern, deconstructionist paradigm. For instance, Geoffrey Stone, a notable critic in the late 1970s, argued that The Importance of Being Earnest was successful with its early audience primarily because despite its structural juxtaposition of “perfect seriousness…with (ostensibly) perfect frivolity,” it must have held some relation to 1890s 
culture (Stone 31). He goes on to point out that much of the play’s dialogue is derived from variations on well known phrases—variations which serve to deconstruct rather than support the culture that they came from (36-37). Stone refers to this strategy as an “inversion of normal metalinguistic procedure,” pointing out that although Wilde is essentially borrowing from culturally established realities, he does so with the express purpose of deconstructing the facts of society (37). Praising Wilde as a proto-modernist, Geoffrey Stone’s critique was one among many that arose in response to modernism’s divergence from traditional literary forms.
Recent Criticism
In the most recent decade, criticism of The Importance of Being Earnest has shifted to focus on a wider range of topics, including film adaptations of the play, its later influence on other playwrights and the transfer of the aestheticist philosophies to which the play subscribed. In 2011, Alex Feldman wrote of Wilde’s impact on the works of modern playwrights such as Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett, suggesting that war dramas have absorbed Wildean elements so strongly that we 
may go so far as to say The Importance of Being Earnest has come to be “identified with the defence of freedom” (Feldman 458). During the fin de sirécle of Wilde’s day, the effeminate degeneracy of Algernon Moncrieff was heavily contrasted against common portrayals of the “gentleman soldier,” two “model of masculinity” that persisting through the duration of World War I (456). Later in the twentieth century however, portrayals of the noble gentleman soldier shifted into comical mockeries that “incorperate[d] many elements of the Wildean dandy” (457).
The Importance of Being Earnest 