Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age

Touring America as the “Apostle of Aestheticism” in 1882, Oscar Wilde brought a witty and controversial message of regeneration through art and beauty to a nation still shaken by the trauma of the Civil War. In this book, the first cultural history of the aesthetic movement in the United States, Mary W. Blanchard shows that it was a wide-ranging popular movement resisted by the moral guardians of Victorianism but advanced by visionary women. .