Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov

Taking as its focus the erotic child in decadent aesthetics, this book explores the sexual and political stakes of an aestheticist experience 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.
"Beautiful, judicious, and finely wrought. Ohi s wonderfully absorbing study shows how 'style' and 'the child' are wed to each other in famous aestheticizing texts: both are a kind of erotic allure, an occasion for rapture, that thwarts assigned cultural contents and luxuriates in disorientations. This is a smart, agile argument, in a book as rigorous as it is relevant to current cultural panics over childhood. With an intelligence as expansive as the sexual possibilities he considers, Ohi drops deep anchors into texts that repay our attention with broad theoretical and political concerns. Keenly, we are shown why embracing the child (with its belligerent mysteries attached to its wandering sexualities) demands the close, imaginative readings Kevin Ohi so brilliantly performs. A distinguished achievement." - Kathryn Stockton, The University of Utah.