A Research on the Death Theme in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales_英语论文

摘要

十九世纪唯美派作家奥斯卡王尔德不仅在戏剧、小说题材上独树一帜，其童话故事也颇具风格。在王尔德的九篇童话中，死亡结局的主人公占到了八篇，可见王尔德对死亡主题的钟情。本文以作者及其作品的简要概述为开端，接着试图分析王尔德代表童话中三类不同的死亡主题：《打鱼人和他的灵魂》中奉献的死亡，《快乐王子》中重生的死亡，以及《星孩》里意外的死亡。最后进行总结，无论是反讽社会黑暗还是挑战社会道德，王尔德童话中的死亡主题都充满美学色彩且引人深思。

关键词：奥斯卡王尔德；童话；死亡主题

Abstract

Oscar Wilde, one of the most famous aesthete in the 19th century, develops a school of himself not only in his dramas and novels, but also in his fairy tales. Among his nine fairy tales, eight of them end up with the deaths of their characters, from which Wilde shows his preference to the death theme. This thesis begins with a brief introduction to the author and his works, and then makes an attempt to analyze the three different kinds of death reflected respectively from his representative fairy tales—the dedicated death in The Fisherman and his Soul, the reborn death in Happy Prince, and the accidental death in Star-Child, and finally draws the conclusion that whether Oscar Wilde's fairy tales satirize social darkness or challenge social morality, their death theme renders those stories full of aesthetic color and thought-provoking.

Key words: Oscar Wilde, fairy tales, death theme

Contents

1. Introduction1

2. Demonstration3

2.1 Three categories of death in Wilde’s fairy tales3

2.1.1 The dedicated death in The Fisherman and his Soul 3

2.1.2 The reborn death in Happy Prince 5

2.1.3 The accidental death in Star-Child 7

2.2 Three connotations of death in Wilde’s fairy tales8

2.2.1 Social connotation 9

2.2.2 Moral connotation11

2.2.3 Aesthetic connotation14

3. Conclusion 16

Works Cited 17

Bibliography 18