Did Wilde have little interest in James? Was James's reaction to Wilde motivated by sexual panic? The answer to these questions in Michele Mendelssohn's incisive and important analysis is a resounding “No” on behalf of a fine argument which offers their relationship with all its tensions and affiliations as a synecdoche for the ebbs and flows of transatlantic aestheticism. She begins with an advertisement for soap (and her text is wonderfully illustrated throughout) as an index to the ways in which, in its American version, aestheticism was not the removed, dandified, and elitist affair that colours the British version. Her method is synchronic rather than diachronic, enabling her to offer “a new way of configuring Aestheticism as a permeable, elastic transatlantic movement that finds its creative force in its antagonisms” (14). She argues for such oppositions to be characteristic of aestheticism as a whole as she moves from James's early work as codifying aesthetic modes of being (in a thoroughly revisionist handling), through to anxieties about authenticity in the late 1880s, the crisis of identity and sexuality of 1895, and Wilde's trial, concluding with the movement's “uncoupling of the aesthetic and the moral” (241). To opposition, we are invited to add transgression and instability as hallmarks of the aesthetic where we find commitment to a vision that forgoes “closure and finds its strength in ambiguities rather than monolithic certainties” (267) and that in the case of Wilde's appropriations and borrowings (what Mendelssohn calls his “review-as-revision” (108) technique), initiates contradiction for standard definitions of value (originality and plagiarism, or creativity and imitation, for example). What is especially impressive here is Mendelssohn's dexterous negotiation of the hurly-burly of the James–Wilde relationship – the private fascinations and the public distancing, the indebtednesses both overt and covert, and, with scrupulous scholarship, the complex circles of personality and ideas they shared and took issue with. In addition there is an abundance of local delights: the attention to Du Maurier's illustrations for Washington Square (allied purposively to his work for Punch), the insertion of James himself into the presentation of Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse, the Wildean resources in The Spoils of Poynton, the unspeakable as a theme shared by The Importance of Being Earnest and Guy Domville, or the groundbreaking analysis of the child–adult configuration in De Profundis and “The Turn of the Screw.” Mendelssohn's text is expressive testimony to the dialectical process that holds true for aestheticism as a movement and for the oscillations of the James–Wilde nexus where self-critique is “responsible for its genesis” and simultaneously for its “degeneration” (271). Her subject has found a superb reader.