Overview
When Oscar Wilde said he had ""seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime,"" his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the young. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that beautiful environments might produce better people.He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and the aesthetic in art and life between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth.
Full Product Details
Author: Douglas Mao
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 3.00cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.624kg
ISBN: 9780691133485
ISBN 10: 0691133484
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 21 April 2008
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Out of Print
Availability: In Print
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.
Language: English
Reviews
[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
Author Information
Douglas Mao is professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of ""Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production"" (Princeton) and coeditor of ""Bad Modernisms"".
