Art for science’s sake: Wilde in Whitman’s wilderness

Abstract

Wilde’s affection for Whitman reveals an overlooked strain of nature-based queer aesthetics not only in Wilde’s writing but in the literary modernist era that both Whitman and Wilde are often considered to anticipate. Such aesthetics are rooted in two evolutionary scientific principles: first, that nature is infinitely mutable; and second, that sexual feeling is aesthetic feeling grounded in the material world.