| Despite increased scholarly interest in Oscar Wilde, no sustained, in-depth study of the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), has yet been published. In addition, scholarship on Wilde's fairy tales is divided into two camps that do not intersect. Literary scholars approach Wilde's fairy tales without consulting fairy tale scholarship. Wilde scholars who find Wilde's indeterminate endings troubling, for example, do not bring to their discussion knowledge of the genre, such as the fact that the indeterminate ending is a fairly common fairy tale convention. Likewise, fairy tale scholarship is limited to seeing Wilde's tales only through the lens of folklore or fairy tale literature.; For the first time, this work will bring the literary and folklore approaches together. I argue that Wilde's fairy tales are a clear expression of Wilde's Aestheticism, and constitute a sub-genre, the Aesthetic Fairy Tale. I focus upon Wilde's deviations from fairy tale genre norms, and explain that these points of difference signal and result from Wilde's Aesthetic principles.; It is impossible to have a complete understanding of Oscar Wilde's literary achievement and Aesthetic sensibilities without a serious consideration of these tales.; Methodologically, I avoid the trend in Wilde criticism to apply biographical facts of Wilde's life to his works of fiction. While Wilde's principles might derive from aspects of Wilde's life as a homosexual or Celt, my interest is in tracing the genre differences and convergences that are the signposts of Wilde's Aesthetic philosophy. This is a work of genre criticism and comparative literary analysis. I examine the fairy tales in the context of the Aesthetic philosophy expressed in Wilde's critical writings, which reflect in some degree the influences of his Aesthetic forbearers Ruskin and Pater (which Wilde goes beyond), and in the context of other original fairy tales by authors such as Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, and Mrs. Molesworth. |
