Description
Book SynopsisRecovers the lost social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. This title shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that environments might produce better people.
Trade Review"[Fateful Beauty] should broaden conceptions about the engineering of ethics in childhood and adolescence. Ideally, it will inspire scholars to look to less obvious sources than the discourse of development for how literature enables (and is enabled by) the construction of the morally treacherous preadult years."--Kirk Curnutt, Journal of American History "The inexhaustibility of aesthetic environments--inattentions waiting to happen--admittedly is reflected in the exhaustiveness of Fateful Beauty's archive. Mao's local textual analyses are both animating and fastidious."--Michael D. Snediker, Modernism/Modernity "[A]mong the many rich contributions of the book is the way it makes visible an intellectual genealogy for contemporary panic about childhood sexuality."--Kevin Ohi, Victorian Studies "Mao's consideration of aesthetics as a significant aspect in literary naturalism allows for a refreshingly unique consideration of Dreiser along with such significant literary figures as James Joyce, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden. As a result, he has made an important contribution to the field that will surely inspire deeper examinations in the coming years."--Michael Shaw, Studies in American Naturalism
Table of ContentsPREFACE ix INTRODUCTION: Talking about Beauty 1 CHAPTER ONE: Stealthy Environments 18 Guarded Moments 18 Significant Surroundings 35 The Unconscious before Freud 45 Secrets of the Aesthetic 56 CHAPTER TWO: Aestheticism's Environments 66 Walter Pater and the Child in the House 66 Oscar Wilde and the Making of the Soul 81 Beauty and Freedom 101 CHAPTER THREE: Aesthetics of Acuteness 109 Aestheticism, Naturalism, Pater, Zola, Joyce, Dreiser 109 Chemical Action Set Up in the Soul 115 Why Integritas 129 CHAPTER FOUR: Tropisms of Longing 139 Compulsions of the Body 139 Insidious Beauty 160 Onward, Onward 166 CHAPTER FIVE: Great House and Super-Cortex 177 West's Ancestral Enclosures 177 Excitatory Complexes 193 Cultivating Treason 203 CHAPTER SIX: Growing Up Awry 216 Auden's Hothouse Plants 216 Evolution and Individuation 227 Showing Off, Setting Off 244 EPILOGUE 256 NOTES 267 REFERENCES 289 INDEX 307
