Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860-1960

Description

Recovers 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.

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".

"[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