Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture

"Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures" is edited by the Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, University of Edinburgh.

With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the premises upon which Area Studies were based have come into question.

Starting from the assumption that the study of American literatures can no longer operate on a nation-based or exceptionalist paradigm, the books in this new series work within a comparative framework to interrogate place-based identities and monocular visions.

The authors attempt instead to develop new paradigms for literary criticism in historical and contemporary contexts of exchange, circulation and transformation. "Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures" seeks uniquely to further the critical, theoretical and ideational work of the developing field of transatlantic literary studies. "Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture" is written by Michele Mendelssohn.In this engaging and provocative reading of the relations between two canonical Anglo-American authors and the aesthetic culture they helped create, Michele Mendelssohn challenges critical assumptions about the way Aestheticism responded to anxieties about nationality, sexuality, identity, influence, originality and morality.

This book, the first fully sustained reading of Henry James' and Oscar Wilde's relationship, reveals why the oppositions between both authors are symptomatic of the cultural oppositions of Aestheticism itself.

It 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' 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 contemporaries 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.