Review: Chris Foss, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories (University of Virginia Press, 2025)

Abstract

Chris Foss’s The Importance of Being Different is the first monograph study of Oscar Wilde’s works from a disability studies perspective, perhaps one of the few lenses through which Wilde has yet to be extensively observed. Indeed, the study proposes to counteract the tendency in scholarship to read ‘Wilde’s nonnormative bodies […] simply as code for queer bodies’ and to explore ‘the nexus of the crip and the queer’ in Wilde’s writings (p. 16). Wilde’s fairy tales, in particular the stories from the collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), are presented as ‘fantastical reflections on the Victorian abjection of peculiar bodies’: a selfish giant, a living statue, a dwarf (Wilde’s term), witches, mermaids, fauns, talking animals, and gossiping flowers, as well as many other supernatural beings (p. 141). The Importance of Being Different therefore builds on major works in the field of Wilde studies – Jarlath Killeen’s The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (2007), Anne Markey’s Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts (2011), and Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood (2017), edited by Joseph Bristow – and also the work of key scholars in disability studies, such as Kylee-Anne Hingston and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, to produce close literary readings of Wilde’s fairy tale texts attending to the extraordinary bodies foregrounded within them.