The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and other Stories by Oscar Wilde
“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.” “Any place you love is the world to you” In these three different collections of stories ( The Happy Prince , 1888, The House of Pomegranate and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories , 1891) we find Wilde experimenting with several styles and aesthetics but always true to himself and his principles; some of these tales have been considered for children but they deal with very adult questions; others are known as parodies of other genres ( Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and The Canterville Ghost ) but criticise harshly the society Wilde lived in; some sound like fairy tales but with much more humour and always keeping his poetic style; while reading the tales in The House of Pomegranate you feel as if you were reading parables from The Bible or The Thousand and One Nights with all their structural repetitions, similes, personifications and use of archaic pronouns. All these stories analyse human vices and virtues. They do not moral...