"Enlarged" Humanity And Value:A Study Of The Metaphor In Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

Oscar Wilde is a well-known British writer in the late 19th century, whose literary creation covers dramas, novels, literary reviews, poems, and fairy tales, among which are quite a few masterpieces. Totally he published nine fairy tales which are included in two collections, that is, The Happy Prince and Other Tales and The House of Pomegranates. In them, The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and Rose and some others have long been listed as world classic fairy tales. Although his fairy tales are distinguished for their profound significance, and many researches have been done in home and aboard, a more detailed study is needed on the relationship between metaphors and themes in his fairy tales. Based on this, the thesis tries to assess the issue in the following two steps. Firstly, it classifies the similes in Wilde’s fairy tales; Secondly, it explores the deep humanity in these fairy tales from the perspective of metaphor.From the aspect of cognition, metaphor is an important mode of thinking based on a man’s life experience. It is a cognitive method for people to understand the world, as well as a basic feature of literary work. In his two fairy tale collections, the statistics show that Wilde uses abundant similes in his fairy tales, amounting to 104. They can be found in every story. The simile is an important tool for him to convey the themes of the stories.Like simile, metaphor is also a significant part of Wilde’s fairy tales. The thesis tries to explore how the explicit similes and conceptual metaphor help to enrich a story’s thematic meanings and reveal the "enlarged" humanity in Wilde’s fairy tales. Through the analysis, it can been found that the explicit similes make the fairy tales vivid, since they make it easier to present the image’s deep meaning, and help the reader comprehend the story’s deep significance. The vividness and profoundness of metaphors make Wilde’s fairy tales suggestive, which helps to show the diversified themes. On the one hand, Wilde employs metaphor to portray characters’ lively personalities. On the other hand, through metaphor, he reveals the personality change or development of one same character in different periods. In this way, metaphor helps to interpret Wilde’s psychological feeling and personal views towards the world, such as his criticism of social reality, compassion for the poor, praise for pure love and pursuit of spiritual eternity. As a representative of aestheticism, Wilde’s fairy tales transcend the school’s pursuit of pure art, and his acute perception of humanity infuses profound significance into the fairy tales.