Mao Fateful Beauty

Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860-1960
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3280-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

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 between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. 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 during this time.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mao, Douglas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

PREFACE 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

Über Autor(innen)

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.