Lateral Aesthetics: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. Seitler tracks the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and argues that fin-de-si cle American writers' aesthetic turn was not only to theorize aesthetic experience, but also to fashion forth an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available forms of sociability and cultural expression.