Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's short story "The Happy Prince" is a satire commenting on social class distinctions and the wastefulness and selfishness of the upper class, particularly the nobility. The story...

In the short story “The Happy Prince,” Oscar Wilde uses many literary devices to create a fairytale that shows how generosity and compassion can alleviate sadness, illness, and poverty, even in a...

Figures of speech enhance a piece of literature by using words in ways that go beyond their literal meaning. Wilde uses euphemism in "The Happy Prince." Euphemism means putting something harsh into...

In Oscar Wilde's short story "The Selfish Giant," the Giant puts walls around his garden to keep the children from playing in it, because he wants to keep the beauty of the garden all to himself....

Oscar Wilde's works include a wide range of nonfiction, plays, a novel, and poems. In these works he expresses a consistent ideological position that art should be independent of morality, and has...

In "The Sphinx Without a Secret," Wilde explores the theme of love. This is shown from the beginning of the story when the narrator meets with his friend Lord Murchison, a man who is "troubled" by...

"The Selfish Giant" centers around a giant with his garden and the children who enjoy playing in it. The giant, when he returns to find the children in his garden, drives them out and builds a wall...

In Oscar Wilde's text "The Model Millionaire," the charming and penniless Hughie Erskine is madly in love with Laura Merton, the daughter of a retired colonel who finds Hughie congenial but will...

Oscar Wilde’s “A Devoted Friend” is an example of a type of story called a “fable.” Fables usually sound like children’s stories because they are meant to instruct or demonstrate a moral, and they...

In short, the title "The Remarkable Rocket" illustrates the self-importance and distorted view of reality that the rocket himself embodies. (He's a plain old rocket, keep in mind, just a stick that...

Rather surprisingly, Oscar Wilde does not use many overt metaphors in "The Happy Prince." He uses a plethora of similes as he describes the settings and characters of the story, but metaphors are...

SIMILES: Comparisons that use the word "like" or "as." a) "The sledge was shaped like a great golden swan..." b) "she was as pale as the Snow Palace in which she had always lived." c) "'"She is...

One way to read the story is as a critique of capitalism and the class structure. The people the Happy Prince tries to help are representative of particular segments of late Victorian society;...

"The Nightingale and the Rose" and "The Happy Prince" are written in the same lyrical style with highly stylized descriptions of beautiful environments. Both have a heroic bird at the center of the...

The swallow is a bird who needs to migrate to a warm climate in the winter months. The swallow in this story instead chooses to stay with the Happy Prince in order to fulfill the prince's request...

In Oscar Wilde's "The Model Millionaire," a young man named Hughie Erskine performs an act of kindness that yields him great reward. Although he is handsome and well-liked, Hughie does not come...

Reading this poem twice is a good idea. If you have no familiarity with the Bible, then the story may not come as easily. This is the difficulty with allusions: if someone is unfamiliar with what...

As a children's story, "The Happy Prince" is indeed meant to be read on the surface level and is, just as it seems, a story entirely about love and humanity. The beginning of the story shows the...

I believe the phrase that best describes Hughie Erskine in the first paragraph of "The Model Millionaire" is he had every accomplishment except that of making money. This best describes Hughie...

Oscar Wilde’s story can be interpreted in general terms as promoting generosity as a path to eternal peace, but it is generally understood as a Christian allegory. The narrator presents the Giant...

The industrial revolution has widened the gap between the rich and the poor like never before in the Victorian era (1830-1900). The literature of the time reflected the growing disparity in the...

In this question, we are asked "to what extent" Wilde's claims are valid. Based on the examples of the readings you provided, it would appear that Wilde's claims are valid only to some extent....

Wilde shows Hugh to be a hypocrite who takes advantage of little Hans while pretending to be his friend. We first see Hugh as unlikable in how generously he helps himself to flowers and fruits from...

There is no doubt that Oscar Wilde's fame is justified. One might quibble about the type of fame he has generally enjoyed. Wilde is said (by André Gide, among others) to have boasted that he put...

If we think about the various social comedies that Wilde wrote, it is clear that one ingredient he added to the form of comedy was the figure of the dandy. The dandy could be defined as a man with...

Oscar Wilde's "The Remarkable Rocket" is a satire, a story that pokes fun at the failings of certain types of people in Victorian society. The focus in this story is on the moral weaknesses of the...

Oscar Wilde was known for having a flamboyant lifestyle because he used his wit and intelligence to pursue a life of pleasure. He adopted a carefully-crafted public reputation which included an...

The Prince was looking over the city noticing how deprived he was of the truth: That while he was Prince and rich, the people of lesser birth died of hunger and disease in poverty at the slums....

I share your inability to find metaphors in this excellent short story. My suggestion, however, is that if you are focussing on figurative language in your work, consider the use of similes in this...

This is a great question because there is, indeed, a difference in the treatment, the descriptions, and the roles of women from one work to the other. In Dorian Gray the roles of women are of...

In The Importance of Being Earnest, philanthropy is mentioned once: when Gwendolen Fairfax goes to the country estate of Jack Worthing, who she believes is really called Ernest, because she wants...

The city in which the story is set gives the impression of being a place where material wealth is considered all-important. The opulent statue of the Happy Prince, with its gold leaf and precious...

As in any era, the literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods reflected social concerns of the time. A general consciousness of the change in the century—the "fin de siecle"—lent the...

Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance follows the tradition of Wilde's comedies of manners. This is a specific theatrical genre that aim to critique and even satirize the common dynamics of...

The poem "The Doer of Good" by Oscar Wilde appears to take place in the Holy Lands during the time of Christ. The two allusions of the two men in the story refer to a leper and a blind man, both of...

During the first of three trials for which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted for Gross Indecency on April 3rd, 1895, Wilde refers to Pater as "The only critic of the century whose opinion I set high" At...

I think that analysis of the themes of these plays might be a very good start in terms of assessing their socially critical value. Even before this, it might be helpful to assert that Wilde,...

As a radical Wildean I can see that he must have said these words back in the aesthetic period of his career where he followed the L'Art Pour L'art movement which (if Im not mistaken) was a Pater...

The top four society comedies in Oscar Wilde's dossier are The Importance of Being Earnest, A Woman of No Importance, Lady Windermere's Fan, and An Ideal Husband. Each of these comedies explore...

Wilde thinks of "individualism" in a way quite different from that of extreme capitalists such as Ayn Rand or social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer. He is mainly concerned with the flourishing...

Oscar Wilde often seems frivolous to the extreme, and readers who identify him as such would not be entirely wrong. However, this frivolity and apparent carelessness actually point to more serious...

Why would us knowing the name of the city make it more intense and exciting to read this excellent short story? Surely the point of the story has nothing to do with the location of the city, but it...

I would suggest that the Victorian period was one of great social and economic change. The Industrial Revolution, for example, changed the structure of society. As the world became "smaller"...

“The Nightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde is a story about a young man who has fallen madly in love with a girl. This is the first difference between these two stories: in Wilde’s story, the...

There are several ways in which the new aesthetic ideas of the French symbolist and Decadent movements influenced the work of Oscar Wilde. Perhaps the most important influence, due both to his...

The Christian undertones in this story are evident from the beginning: the Giant is described as selfish, and given that the story is geared towards children, the narrative makes it quite evident...