The importance of not being earnest: Children and Oscar Wilde's fairy tales

Oscar Wilde was dismissive of contemporary approaches to education and of Victorian constructions of childhood. His fairy tales neither empathise with children nor privilege them as characters. Nonetheless children form a distinct focus for his tales. In creating his hybrid form of the fairy tale, he elides boundaries drawn between adult and young readers and also between the forms of the literary fairy tale, the popular folk tale and contemporary literary styles. His fairy tales insistently attend to surface reality and reject psychological realism. They also reject many of the conventions of fairy tales, and are characterised by an absence of any simple equation between good and evil; by signifiers with shifting meanings; and self‐conscious use of language and complex narrative techniques. As such they demand of their readers a critical, probing approach that may be paralleled with that of members of the Philosophy with Children movement.