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To perceive the central role of the erotic child in decadent aesthetics is to perceive the queer potential of literary pleasure in aestheticism. Such is Kevin Ohi's claim in Innocence and Rapture, where detailed readings of Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov contrast the erotic child of aestheticism with the innocent child of contemporary sexual ideology. The protection of innocence aims, above all,... More

To perceive the central role of the erotic child in decadent aesthetics is to perceive the queer potential of literary pleasure in aestheticism. Such is Kevin Ohi's claim in Innocence and Rapture, where detailed readings of Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov contrast the erotic child of aestheticism with the innocent child of contemporary sexual ideology. The protection of innocence aims, above all, to safeguard certainties of meaning and identity; at stake is less the well-being of any child than an autonomy unruptured by equivocal origination. The disorientations of meaning and identity that today occasion panic and punitive enforcement mark for aestheticist writers nothing short of the rapturous possibilities of art. An attentive reading of aestheticist style cannot but confront its queerness; aestheticism's rapture, this book argues, harbors an unexamined political potential, which calls into question contemporary conceptions of childhood innocence and the ideologies of sexual normalcy that sustain them.

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