The Importance of Being Different (eBook)

Disability in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales

Chris Foss (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
182 Seiten
University of Virginia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8139-5302-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Understanding Oscar Wilde's characteristically unique approach to writing difference Over the course of his remarkable career, Oscar Wilde published two volumes of fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. Both collections feature numerous stories with protagonists who may be said to be disability-aligned, owing to their pronounced physical differences. In The Importance of Being Different, Chris Foss explores the way that Wilde's stories problematically replicate many of the Victorian era's typical responses to disability but also the ways they diverge, offering a more progressive orientationboth through more sympathetic identifications with disability-aligned characters and through a self-conscious foregrounding of the mechanisms of pity and the consumption of pain. The first ever monograph to examine Wilde's work through a disability studies lens, this groundbreaking book encompasses all of his fairy tales as well as his writings during and after imprisonment. Even though Wilde unflinchingly represented the extent to which these peculiar bodies suffered rejection by society, he encouraged his readers to embrace them and to advocate for emotional responses that engage love and kindness toward both individual transformation and social change.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.4.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Peculiar Bodies
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: affective response • Children's literature • Compassionate Action • disability-aligned difference • disability-aligned love • Disability Studies • dwarfism • enfoolment • Enfreakment • figure of the child • Folklore • freak studies • intersectional disability • nonnormative bodies • Prison Literature • reciprocal pity • The Birthday of the Infanta • The Fisherman and his Soul • The Selfish Giant • The Star-Child • utopian transformation • Victorian Literature • Wilde's prison experience
• ISBN-10: 0-8139-5302-2 / 0813953022
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8139-5302-1 / 9780813953021