When Oscar Wilde acknowledged he had "seen wallpaper which needs to lead a boy mentioned below its effect to a lifetime of crime," his shaggy dog story performed on an concept that has frequently been taken rather seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our personal. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the misplaced highbrow, social, and literary historical past of the assumption that the beauty--or ugliness--of the surroundings during which one is raised affects or perhaps determines one's destiny. Weaving jointly readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, schooling, child-rearing suggestion, and inside layout, he exhibits how this concept abetted a dramatic upward thrust in realization to atmosphere in lots of discourses and in lots of practices affecting the lives of the younger among the past due 19th century and the center of the 20th. via unique and designated analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao exhibits that English-language writing of the interval was once educated in an important yet formerly unrecognized methods via the prospect that lovely environments may perhaps produce greater humans. He additionally unearths how those writers shared matters approximately surroundings, evolution, determinism, freedom, and wonder with scientists and social theorists equivalent to Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao demanding situations traditional perspectives of the jobs of attractiveness and the classy in paintings and existence in this time.

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