Abstract
Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are known for their dark, parodic rewriting of the genre. Often featuring cruel, selfish children, Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates offers complicated endings that challenge conventional morality. This essay examines how Wilde undermines the concept of childhood innocence through a depiction of children whose selfish absorption in beauty causes widespread suffering. Rather than rejecting aestheticism, Flegel argues, these tales instead embrace a queer aesthetic, one that embraces the death drive and rejects bourgeois constructions both of the child and of beauty itself.
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Flegel, M. (2018). Innocent Cruelty and the Love of Beauty in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. In: Flegel, M., Parkes, C. (eds) Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72275-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72275-7_3
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