Queer Aestheticism in Henry James's Roderick Hudson (1875).

Abstract

In his recent study about the influence of aestheticism in the formation of queer cultures and identities, Dustin Friedman argues that aestheticism is, at best, a hard movement to define; its members just as hard to identify (Friedman 2019, 8). He states, however, that for aesthetes art provides a venue where they “can test whether the conceptual limits structuring their lives are absolute and uncontestable, or whether they can be challenged and reimagined” (Friedman 2019, 14). Acknowledging a connection between Greek art and culture and aestheticism through the writings of Walter Pater and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, this paper aims to explore how Henry James’s Roderick Hudson (1878) employs aestheticism as a re-orienting device toward its implicit queer aspects.