| Popis: |
Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale “The Birthday of the Infanta” (1891) echoes an ellective affinity, which hitherto has not been discuss very often, between Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy and Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic principles, to wit, the idea of cruelty, its association with pleasure and its depiction in Art and Culture. The essay discusses these ideas in the tale, by pinpointing the specific affinities between both authors, which are semiotic and aesthetic in nature. Thus, the essay boasts a novel interpretation of the tale, firstly, because it highlights the ideas of reading and interpretation of cruelty in an aesthetic milieu as the textual driving force; secondly, because the analysis categorically challenges traditional moral readings of the story, which nowadays still inform a great deal of critical readings of the text. |
