A Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Fairy Tales: As Seen in the Happy Prince and the Scarecrow

As a genre of juvenile and children's literature, fairy tale has been of much renown in Chinese and western countries. Western fairy tales are well known worldwide, Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince can be taken as an example. It tells a story on the relationship, developing from unfamiliarity, acquaintance to dependence, between the happy prince and the sparrow. With regard to Chinese fairy tales, The Scarecrow written by Ye Shengtao is one of the early representative works in modern Chinese fairy tales. It presents three bitter scenes the scarecrow viewed in the nighttime. Based on a comparative analysis of the two fairy tales from such four aspects as historical backgrounds, characters, plots and themes, this essay attempts to detect the underlying reasons for their emergence, in the hope of achieving a further understanding of the two fairy tales.