SOURCE: Stone, Geoffrey. “Serious Bunburyism: The Logic of The Importance of Being Earnest.” Essays in Criticism 26, no. 1 (January 1976): 28-41.

In the following essay, Stone examines the metalinguistic aspects of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

A meta-language is a language you use to deal with given statements and their relations with actual facts. ‘In order to speak about the correspondence between a statement S and a fact F, we need a language (a metalanguage) in which we can speak about the statement S and state the fact F’ (Popper, Objective Knowledge, p. 316). Analogically the concept of meta-language can be extended into literature by differentiating between an actual and an implied statement or word-set. Meta-activity is occurring when actual and implied word-sets and the reality they both claim to relate to are being dealt with together. The concept is not empty; some examples may make its usefulness clearer.

The...