Description:
"Douglas Mao's Fateful Beauty is a compelling work of intellectual, social, and literary history that reclaims aestheticism as a revolutionary social as well as artistic creed. This magisterial and groundbreaking work should emerge as a standard one on the period. Mao is a writer who commands attention and respect through his scrupulous research, careful arguments, and eloquence as a cultural and literary critic."--Maria DiBattista, Princeton University
"This book provides a really original take on the literature of the fin de siècle and high modernism, suggesting how central the imaginative labor of literary works was to the social, philosophical, and cultural traditions of the period. Mao works out his claims with a subtlety, depth, and range of reference that is deeply impressive. The book is written with unusual clarity, precision, and grace, adding to one's sense that it is the product of a major critic coming into his own. A splendid piece of work."--Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan
Review Quotes: "[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