Short Story Criticism | Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, Oscar Wilde - Leonara R. Villegas (essay date autumn 1997)

Leonara R. Villegas (essay date autumn 1997)

SOURCE: Villegas, Leonara R. “Approaching an Irony of Difference: The Self as an Outsider in the Short Stories of Oscar Wilde.” Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle/Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 29 (autumn 1997): 59-66.

[In the following essay, Villegas considers the role of the Outsider in Wilde's short fiction.]

In the short stories of Oscar Wilde, compassion underscores the experiences of the characters. The complexity of their emotional awakenings is such that they anticipate a modernist connotation of the word, as illustrated by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As a synthetic emotion, the implications of compassion are determined by its roots: the non-Latinate root that means feeling, as well as the Latin root that means either “sympathy” or “condescension” (Kundera, 1984, 20). Hence, Kundera takes great exception to this emotion, and...

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