When Oscar Wilde said he had "seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime," his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful...
In this provocative and wide-ranging study, Douglas Mao argues that a profound tension between veneration of human production and anxiety about production's dangers lay at the heart of literary modernism. Focusing on the work of...