Abstract:
Fairy tales have always had an irresistible fascination for children and adults alike.
As a text type, they have a very old tradition that goes back to antiquity. Over the
centuries, the fairy tale has developed its own structure and set of conventions that
classify it as a separate genre. Its roots are in the oral narrative tradition. With an
increase in literacy and the invention of the printing press, it developed its own
distinct written version referred to as the literary fairy tale, which, over the years,
have been collected or compiled by various writers, the most famous among them
being the Brothers Grimm. A name within this genre that has not received his due
literary recognition is that of Oscar Wilde, for his literary fairy tales have been
overshadowed by his brilliant plays and his towering personality.
In this study, we examined Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales and attempted to establish them
as belonging to the fairy tale text type by investigating their structure and their
semantic as well as their syntactic features. First, we applied Propp’s morphological
model to study their syntactic structure. Second, we focused on the manner in which
the Faerie Realm is created in the tales. For this purpose, we analysed the interplay
of time and space in the discourse world of the tales from a cognitive stance; and
explored the use of grammatical devices.
The study confirms that Wilde’s tales belong to the literary fairy tale text type in
structure, though with abundant ambiguities. We found that these ambiguities do not
affect the structure of the tales. In terms of the fairy tale time and space, the tales
were found to be in alignment with the fairy tale discourse world in spite of
deviations and variations from the set conventions. The analyses revealed that the
choice of grammatical devices serves to bring the tales on a parallel to the oral
tradition. The final assessment was that the tales are multi-layered and serve to
enchant both children and adults.
