| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fateful Beauty: bbbbsthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860–1960. By Douglas Mao. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xii, 319 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-13348-5.)

Studies of juvenile delinquency—whether in the United Kingdom or the United States—traditionally read literature against the disciplinary contexts of the law, parenting, and/or education, examining how subcultures of rebellion are articulated against and then appropriated back into mainstream cultures, often through the agency of the "moral panic." Douglas Mao's Fateful Beauty takes a surprisingly (and refreshingly) different tack by looking to a far more literal environment—the physical one, beginning with home decor. Spinning off a throwaway joke made by Oscar Wilde during his 1882 North American lecture tour ("Why, I have seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime; you should not have such incentives to sin lying about your drawing-rooms" [p. 1]), Mao, the author of Solid Objects (1998) and co-editor of Bad Modernisms (2006), maps an impressively diverse trek through English literature from Walter Pater to W. H. Auden to reveal the continuity and variety of concern with regulating morality through aesthetically enriching surroundings. The resulting study should broaden conceptions about the engineering of ethics in childhood and adolescence. Ideally, it will inspire scholars to look to less obvious sources than the discourse of development for how literature enables (and is enabled by) the construction of the morally treacherous pre-adult years.

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