ABSTRACT
Reflecting Walter Pater’s diverse engagements with literature, the visual arts, history, and philosophy, this collection of essays explores new interdisciplinary perspectives engaging readers and scholars alike to revisit methodologies, intertextualities, metaphysical positions, and stylistic features in the works of the Victorian essayist. A revised contextual portrait of Pater in Victorian culture questions representations of the detached aesthete. Current editorial and biographical projects show Pater as fully responsive to the emergence of modern consumer culture and the changes in readership in Britain and the United States. New critical views of rarely studied texts enhance the image of Pater as a cosmopolitan aesthete dialoguing with contemporary culture. Conceptual analysis of his texts brings new light to the aesthetic paradox embodied by Pater, between artistic detachment and immersion in the Heraclitean flux of life. Finally, aestheticism is redefined as proposing new artistic and linguistic synthesis by merging art forms and embracing interart poetics.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|54 pages
Pater’s Modern Involvement
part II|58 pages
Intertextualities
chapter 4|20 pages
Trace, Race, and Grace
chapter 5|20 pages
The Loveliness of Things and the Sorrow of the World
chapter 6|16 pages
A Great Chain of Curiosity
part III|54 pages
Modern Interactions
chapter 7|21 pages
“What an interesting period . . . is this we are in!”
chapter 9|13 pages
“Unimpassioned Passion”
part IV|49 pages
Interart Poetics