ABSTRACT
For in his Imaginary Portraits, Walter Pater takes his criticism of G. W. F. Hegel's 'radical dualism' into the realm of a Nietzschean attack on philosophical idealism. In terms of parallels between Pater's genre of the imaginary portrait and other forms of the short story, the closest is probably the recits of Maurice Blanchot. Pater's autobiographical project — the coming-to-self-consciousness of the lesser reason — began in 'The Child in the House', the story of Pater's own childhood home and 'that process of brain-building by which we are, each one of us, what we are'. 'The Child in the House' truly is the source of both Pater's Hegelian fiction, as the writing of his coming-to-self-consciousness, and his post-Hegelian fiction, the imaginary portraits. The key concepts are the same in both the Imaginary Portraits and the Genealogy: Hegelianism constitutes ressentiment, bad conscience, ascesis, decadence, and nihilism.
