Art about/within art: a metafictional reading of oscar wilde’s “the nightingale and the rose”

Abstract

This monograph paper aims at articulating the theory of metafiction with an analysis of Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose”. In our critical reading of Wilde’s fairy tale, we analyzed the instances in which the artistic composition was made especially visible within the work of art, through the materialization of different metafictional creative devices. We could notice a parodic intent that ordered the short story’s narrative construction, thus allowing for the recoding of the classical tradition of fairy-tale writings; the dialogues, held with poetry and music, and the philosophy of art that Wilde engendered in his story also contributed to the narrative’s parodic and metafictional status. Having considered the metafictional creative strategies, we concluded that Wilde was able to artistically innovate by re-elaborating a literary genre that had become overly didactic in Victorian England, at the same time in which he reconnected his narrative with the utopian kernel of oral folktales and led us to reflect on questions that are not usually found in the literary fairy tales by his time, such as the function of art and the role played by the artist.