A perspectiva sócio-histórica dos contos de fada de Oscar Wilde

Abstract

It is true that literature awakens in the individual certain emotions and reflections according to the theme that literary works bring up. We say so from the readers’ perspective and we often do not concern about the authors’ perspective. For readers, the reflection on the themes brought by literature tends more to lay on personal or social aspects of contemporaneity. However, analyzing the writer’s perspective, we are led not to think of the current context, but of the one in which the work was produced and the possible reasons that led the author to address such situations. Thus, this work, through historical research, aims to analyze two of the nine short stories produced by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, who lived in English society during the Victorian Age, and whose work depicted everyday situations that used to plague the poor, especially with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The short stories we have chosen were "The Happy Prince" and "The Birthday of the Infanta". In the first one, characteristics of the society are portrayed in general, because it is narrated several situations that involve a few characters, whereas in the second one the author focus his approach on the thoughts of two dichotomous characters that actually we understand as complementary in their differences. We can say that in "The Happy Prince" Wilde speaks of society in general and in "The Birthday of the Infanta" he exemplifies the social characteristics in one character in favor of the dilapidation of another one. For this analysis, the study will focus on research on fairy tales in general and on the relations between literature and society, based on works such as "Literatura e Sociedade" (CANDIDO, 2000) and “Teoria da Literatura” (WELLEK e WARREN, 1955), focusing on Wilde's fairy tales, especially those that we have selected for study.