Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture

In this engaging and provocative reading of the relations between two canonical Anglo-American authors and the aesthetic culture they helped create, Michèle 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'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.