A01=Douglas Mao
Adult
Aesthetic Theory
Aestheticism
Aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Alienist
Anthony Burgess
Apathy
Archetype
Arthur Schopenhauer
Author_Douglas Mao
automatic-update
Behaviorism
Bildungsroman
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DS
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=HBLL
Category=HPN
Category=QDTN
Cesare Lombroso
Consciousness
COP=United States
Culture and Society
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Determination
Eduard von Hartmann
Education
Ellen Key
Epigram
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Erasmus Darwin
Eugenics
Hedonism
Henri Bergson
Herbert Spencer
Highbrow
Hypnosis
Ideology
Incorruptibility
Individualism
Jennie Gerhardt
Joseph Priestley
Language_English
Literature
Lydia Maria Child
Meanness
Modernism
Morality
Mozart effect
Narrative
Neuroticism
Non-fiction
Obscenity
Of Education
Oppression
PA=Available
Paul Goodman
Philosophy
Physiognomy
Physiology
Plato
Poetry
Price_€20 to €50
Prose
PS=Active
Psychoanalysis
Psychology
Romanticism
Ronald Firbank
Sentimental Education
Simile
Social Statics
softlaunch
Stephen Dedalus
Subconscious
Suggestibility
Suggestion
Superiority (short story)
The Realist
The Soul of Man under Socialism
Theodore Dreiser
Thought
Unconscious inference
Utilitarianism
Walter Pater
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691146614
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 23 May 2010
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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".
