The History of British-American Criticism 2 (1996), which marks the final installment to Sangsup Lee’s trilogy on the history of British-American criticism―in addition to The History of British-American Criticism 1 (1985) and Poetics of Complexity: a Study on New Criticism (1987)―stands out from other works of similar nature in that the text treats the British Aestheticism as an artistic theory requiring spotlight in its own right. Nonetheless, the sense of Arnoldian ‘disinterest’ and the objective balance duly maintained by the author toward critical works of the aesthetic movement begin to crack once he confronts, after his more than evenhanded assessment of Walter Pater, the radically subversive ideas of Oscar Wilde, going so far as to recall, in such stringent expressions as “shameful end” and “our justifiable hatred,” the moralistic piety of the bygone Victorian era. Embracing ‘close reading’ as one of the central scholarly legacies bequeathed by Lee, the present inquiry attempts to closely examine Lee’s take on Wilde and show the problematic grounds as well as certain blind spots informing and circumscribing the former’s critique of the latter. If, in the process, Lee’s reaction to Wilde’s aesthetic theory turns out to reflect anxiety and resentment toward the uncanny possibility of exposure and contamination by such Wildean motifs as ontological indeterminacy and spectrality, I argue that such defence mechanism calls for a vigilant reflection on our part on our changing ontological conditions and their limits even or especially in a period spurred on by the so-called posthumanistic discourse.