SEMANTICO-SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF OSCAR WILDE’S FAIRY TALES

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.