Customer Reviews

Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age

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Reading this book has been an astonishing experience . . . Never have I been so informed by the substantiality of the aesthetic ideas of Oscar Wilde in an American context I thought I knew. Who, after all, has ever connected Wilde with William Dean Howells and Henry Adams? Nor was I aware of the impact of aestheticism on the thoughts and innovative behavior of middle class women during the so-called Gilded Age. Henceforth that catch phrase will always betoken a deeper or at least a double meaning. Blanchard's subtle yet precise writing, drawn from an enormous range of fresh and original materials, exhibits the aestheticism Wilde so powerfully preached.

Ms. Blanchards book was meticulously reasearched and presented. It was an innovative approach to the years after the Civil War exposing a counter culture that I was astonished to discover.But she did discover it and unknown and unheralded women who make this worthy book even more fascinating.

Blanchard's book is about a whole counterculture, not usually suspected of flourishing in the last decades of the 20th century in the America of Carnegie and Bryan. Blanchard not only proves beyond doubt that it was there, like the contemporary movements in England and France, but also that it was rich, embracing all the arts, both sexes, and every expression of gender, not to mention fashion, popular culture and arts usually labelled "domestic." Designed with an equally rich iconography, its text laid out together with contemporary pictures, "Oscar Wilde's America" is a model of cultural and intellectual history -- which might confuse poststructuralists and anti-poststructuralists alike.