1.3.2 Studies in China

In 1920s, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales were introduced into China. Zhou Zuoren was the first one who translated Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” and published it on A Collection of Foreign Short stories which was edited by his brother Zhou Shuren and him. He commented that “it has a tendency to humanitarian.” His fairy tales attracted a lot of scholars like Shen Zemin, Shen Yanbing, Zhang Wen tian and Wang Fuquan during the May fourth Movement. The young often borrow his opinion of aestheticism because it opposed moral intervention in literature and art, which met the pursuit of the young. Their attention to Wilde’s tales leaded the first climax of studying his works. At that time, the reviews were mainly from the perspectives of humanitarian and social criticism because there was a social change in China and people were advocating for democracy. 

From the 1940s to the 1980s, the realm of art in China was in a state of dormancy. Oscar Wide, the bourgeoisie, there is no wonder why Chinese pay little attention to him at that time. In 1948, the well-known Chinese Writer Ba Jin translated all of his nine fairy tales and published those in the book named The Happy Prince and Other Tales. In 1989, Zhang Jianyu published “On the Fairy Tale Model in Wilde’s Prose Narrative Works” in the magazine Foreign Literature Review. Because of the domestic political environment, the study of his fairy tales could not go further.

In the 21th century, there is another climax of studying Wilde. In this period, the study became prosperous not only in amount but also in quality. However, the study put a particular emphasis on Wilde’s life story, literary criticism, plays and short stories. His fairy tales, which had the most versions, was left out in the cold. While, there are still some scholars who are moved by the extraordinary charm and enrich the achievements of studying his fairy tales. For example, in 2000, Jin Lili published her “A Comparison of Chinese and Western Narration Pattern: Regarding of the ‘The Scarecrow and ‘The Happy Prince”’ and showed similarities between “The Scarecrow” and “The Happy Prince” from the perspective of narration. In 2006, the master thesis ‘The Growth of the Awareness of Children: A Study of the Chinese Translations of “The Happy Prince”’, which is written by Shi Tingting, focuses on the comparison of the different Chinese versions of “The Happy Prince” and draws the conclusion that with time going by, the awareness of children in the Chinese versions of his fairy tales is growing. “A Study on Narratology of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales”, the master thesis written by Wang Jianzhen in 2015, focuses on Wilde’s narratology which includes narrative order, narrative frequency, narrative perspective and so on in his fairy tales. In conclusion, the perspectives of the reviews of Wilde’s fairy tales are becoming various and the study are going further.