Literary Stylistic Analysis of Aestheticism in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

Abstract

The important role Oscar Wilde played in the world literature is determined by his Aestheticism to some degree, and his fairy tales, which are the elegant combination of his thoughts and the style of fairy tales, are regarded as the classic works of Aestheticism. Based on The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates, the paper provided objective evidence of his Aestheticism from four literary stylistic features, including lexics, syntax, point of view and rhetoric devices; on the other hand, it aimed to study his transcendence of the principle of beauty by the anti-traditional beauty reflected in his works, through which a better understanding and appreciation of aesthetic value and spiritual value can be achieved.