Shewan’s by now classic Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (1977) suggests
that in The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s characters
adhere to Brown & Levinson’s Politeness Principle in their dialogues.
This article partly criticizes such an assumption; it holds that in
the dialogues the characters’ utterances flout the Politeness Principle,
thus leaving room for Wilde’s conception of the self to come through.
The article also states that such a flouting can only be understood by
inserting a new variable into Brown & Levinson’s equation Wx = D(S,H)
+ P(H,S) + Rx.
