Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture / / Michèle Mendelssohn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Mendelssohn, Michèle,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2007
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures : ESTLI
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.)

Challenges critical assumptions about the way Aestheticism responded to anxieties about nationality, sexuality, identity, influence, originality and moralityThis book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James’s and Oscar Wilde’s relationship, reveals why the antagonisms between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions within Aestheticism itself. The book also shows how these conflicting energies animated the late nineteenth century’s most exciting transatlantic cultural enterprise.Richly illustrated and historically detailed, this study of James’s and Wilde’s intricate, decades-long relationship brings to light Aestheticism’s truly transatlantic nature through close readings of both authors’ works, as well as nineteenth-century art, periodicals and rare manuscripts. As Mendelssohn shows, both authors were deeply influenced by the visual and decorative arts, and by contemporary artists such as George Du Maurier and James McNeill Whistler. Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture offers a nuanced reading of a complex relationship that promises to transform the way in which we imagine late nineteenth-century British and American literary culture.Key FeaturesThe first study devoted exclusively to Wilde and James, who are the most important Irish and American nineteenth-century authorsRewrites standard assumptions about James's and Wilde's relationship and traces its implications for British and American AestheticismRedefines Aestheticism and offers full re-readings of late nineteenth-century literature, visual and material culture, theatre, as well as psychology and sexual identityRefers to several previously unpublished letters by Henry James

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- INTRODUCTION -- Chapter 1 ‘I have asked Henry James not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde’: Daisy Miller, Washington Square and the Politics of Transatlantic Aestheticism -- Chapter 2 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies and of remaking aestheticism -- Chapter 3 The school of the future as well as the present: Wilde’s Impressions of James in Intentions and The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Chapter 4 ‘Wild thoughts and desire! Things I can’t tell you – words I can’t speak!’: The Drama of Identity in The Importance of Being Earnest and Guy Domville -- Chapter 5 Despoiling Poynton: James, the Wilde Trials and Interior Decoration -- Chapter 6 ‘A nest of almost infant blackmailers’: The End of Innocence in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and De Profundis -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX