Book Description

For great aestheticist writers such as Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov, viewing a work of art or reading a literary text is often rapturously overwhelming, provoking a dissolution of identity through an absorption with the aesthetic object. The intensity of this cultivated rapture largely depends on the sexualized fascination exerted by the beautiful child. Examining the centrality of the child's emblematic allure to the aesthetics of these writers helps to specify how their texts undermine many of the oppositions that have structured their reception, oppositions that have pitted, for example, historical reference against form and aesthetics against both politics and erotics. The desired and desiring child in these texts points to a homoerotics erotics and intergenerational desire articulated through, and formed by, aesthetic style. Exploring the relation of style and desire through children and through the subversion, in these texts, of a narrative of aesthetic education, the thesis examines aesthetic experience as the rapture of identificatory disorientation and the allure of death in Pater's notion of the Renaissance; it contrasts psychiatric denunciations of pedophilia to a more expansive discourse of narcissism in Lacanian psychoanalysis and to the erotic possibilities of reading as an ecstatic experience of formation in. The Picture of Dorian Gray; it suggests that The Turn of the Screw might be read as an allegory of contemporary narratives of erotic innocence where the protection of innocence is innocence's endangerment; it argues that What Maisie Knew presents an identification with a child's point of view that is both made inevitable and rigorously shown to be impossible, that the novel, by linking her excruciating position establishing systems of exchange in the novel to her position establishing novelistic representation, eschews contemporary sentimental narratives of innocence's endangerment; and it explores the deployment of sentimentality in Lolita as both a disruption to narratives of sincere confession and remorse (the dominant terms of the novel's criticism challenged as Humbert makes the impossibility of sincere confession stand in for an impossible desire, articulating a passionate erotics of melancholia) and to an ideology built around the coerced forgetting of the impossibility of the aesthetic education.