Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age - Hardcover

Blanchard, Mary Warner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300074603 ISBN 13: 9780300074604

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Touring America as the "Apostle of Aestheticism" in 1882, Oscar Wilde brought a witty and controversial message of regeneration through art and beauty to a nation still shaken by the trauma of the Civil War. In this book, the first cultural history of the aesthetic movement in the United States, Mary W. Blanchard shows that it was a wide-ranging popular movement resisted by the moral guardians of Victorianism but advanced by visionary women. .

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The Wilde revival?or is it a craze??continues with Blanchard's study of the Apostle of Aestheticism and his influence on art and culture in America's Gilded Age, that blink in time between the "bronzed heroism" of the Civil War and Teddy Roosevelt's imperialist machismo. Like the recent film Wilde, Blanchard, an associate fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, opens with Wilde's triumphant 1892 lecture tour of the U.S., when the writer was at the pinnacle of his success (in 1895 he would be convicted of "gross indecency"). Her first few chapters constitute a detailed, though familiar, exploration of "aesthetic style and the masculine self," which recalls many of the conclusions and propositions already advanced by such theorists as Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfeld, and historians such as Ann Douglas, George Chauncey and Jackson Lears (all of whom are cited). Fresher material follows in Blanchard's meticulous foray into the decorative arts, using nearly 200 lovely period illustrations of popular art and dress, outlining the role of women as tastemakers. Her discussion of largely unsung "female visionaries" (Candace Wheeler, Celia Thaxter, M. Louise McLaughlin and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer), and of "the aesthetic parlor," "the female body" and "the catholic icon," adds new perspective on the period and serves to support her contention that in the U.S., "aestheticism was the story of the feminine and domestic world." Wilde's fall, Blanchard argues, was paralleled by an American "repressive reaction" largely because of the association between aesthetic style and the feminine. While the "counterculture" of the 1880s?by now a kind of Hundred Years War of sense and sensibility?remains at the cultural borders, work like Blanchard's has moved questions of aesthetics and gendered identity into the heart of the land.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

...[an] enlightening cultural history of the struggle between art and Victorian convention. -- The Boston Globe, Robert Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0300074603
• ISBN 13: 9780300074604
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320