1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910450587103321

Autore

Ohi Kevin <1972->

Titolo

Innocence and rapture [[electronic resource] ] : the erotic child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov / / Kevin Ohi

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, N.Y., : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

ISBN

1-281-36399-5

9786611363994

1-4039-7855-7

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (240 p.)

Disciplina

820.9353809034

Soggetti

English literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Children and erotica

Art for art's sake (Movement)

American literature - 19th century - History and criticism

American literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Children in literature

Aestheticism (Literature)

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-216) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction : innocence and rapture -- "Doomed creatures of immature radiance" : Renaissance, death, and rapture in Walter Pater -- Narcissists anonymous : reading and Dorian Gray's new worlds -- "Blameless and foredoomed" : innocence and haste in The turn of the screw -- Sentimentality, desire, and aestheticism in Lolita.

Sommario/riassunto

Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticistexperience of rapture. Ohi examines the power of the work of art to transport, to disorient, to move, to extort the equivocal pleasuresof self-loss. He also explores how the beautiful child offers partisans of 'art for art's sake' an emblem for the ecstatic and erotic, even the queer possibilities of art. Aestheticism's erotic child is thus in stark contrast to the innocent child of today's ideology, who secures the claims of identity



against the very disorientations celebrated by aestheticism. Articulating aesthetic transport through the desiring and desired child, aestheticism interrogates the ideology underpinning sexual oppression.