Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860-1960

When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously—both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty—or ugliness—of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, ...