The Platonism of Walter Pater

The Platonism of Walter Pater

Author: Adam Lee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-06

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0192588141

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As a teacher of Plato in Oxford's Literae Humaniores, Walter Pater was informed by philosophy from his earliest essays to his last book. The Platonism of Walter Pater examines Pater's deep engagement with Platonism throughout his career. It overturns his reputation as a superficial aesthete known mainly for his 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance to reposition his contribution to literature and the history of ideas. In his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth, Pater was influenced by several of Plato's dialogues. Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Cratylus, and The Republic informed his philosophy of beauty, history, myth, knowledge, ethics, language, and style. As a philosopher, critic, and artist, Plato embodied what it meant to be an author to Pater, who imitated his creative practice from vision to expression. For Pater Platonism was also a point of contact with his contemporaries, including Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, offering a means to take new measure of their literary relationships. Using the interdisciplinary critical tools of Pater's own educational milieu which combined literature, philosophy, and classics, The Platonism of Walter Pater repositions the importance Pater's contribution to literature and the history of ideas.


Walter Pater

Walter Pater

Author: Laurel Brake

Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 81

ISBN-13: 0746307160

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Walter Pater (1839-94) was an active participant in the literary marketplace as an academic, journalist, critic, writer of short stories, and novelist at a time of the rise of English and of journalism, university reform, and the professionalisation and separating out of literature from journalism. He was also a classicist whose interest in Greek studies coincided with a commitment to explore in his writings the scope of male homosexual discourse. This critical study of a key figure in Victorian literary society examines Pater's work on art history, literature and Greek studies, as well as analysing the roles of gender and journalism in shaping his writing. Laurel Brake approaches Pater's writings from the prospective of cultural history - including publishing and the politics of literature and gender - and covers his key works, including Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Style, Imaginary Portraits, Marius the Epicurean, and Greek Studies.


Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture

Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture

Author: Lene ?termark-Johansen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1351537229

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Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture is the first monograph to discuss the Victorian critic Walter Pater's attitude to sculpture. It brings together Pater's aesthetic theories with his theories on language and writing, to demonstrate how his ideas of the visual and written language are closely interlinked. Going beyond Pater's views on sculpture as an art form, this study traces the notion of relief (rilievo) and hybrid form in Pater, and his view of the writer as sculptor, a carver in language. Alongside her treatment of rilievo as a pervasive trope, Lene ?termark-Johansen also employs the idea of rivalry (paragone) more broadly, examining Pater's concern with positioning himself as an art critic in the late Victorian art world. Situating Pater within centuries of European aesthetic theories as never before done, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture throws new light on the extraordinary complexity and coherence of Pater's writing: The critic is repositioned solidly within Victorian art and literature.


The Collected Works of Walter Pater, Vol. IX: Correspondence

The Collected Works of Walter Pater, Vol. IX: Correspondence

Author: Robert Seiler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-01-05

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0192848313

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Imaginary Portraits' is volume 3 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life. Pater's Imaginary Portraits are among some of the most stylish and original pieces of short fiction in Victorian literature: portrayals of a series of handsome male protagonists across the ages of European history, set against a range of evocative European backdrops from Classical Greece to Medieval France, eighteenth-century Germany and modern England. Together, they constitute a remarkable testimony to Pater's profound understanding of centuries of cultural history, reworked in the0hybrid genre of the imaginary portrait as sophisticated portrait miniatures of minor characters touched and affected by major moments in European history. They question central issues of nationhood and belonging, a Pan-European cultural identity, and the fate of the individual in the face of collective history. As formative texts for Modernist writers like Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, Pater's Imaginary Portraits had an impact which reached far beyond the nineteenth century.


Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

Author: Charles Martindale

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1108875696

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This first collected discussion of Pater's significance for English literary criticism reveals his importance in shaping the principles of Modernist criticism and comprehensively contextualises his work. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.


Walter Pater and Persons

Walter Pater and Persons

Author: Stephen Cheeke

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-06-20

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 019892027X

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Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.


Walter Pater

Walter Pater

Author: Kate Hext

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-06-30

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0748683585

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Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging moder


Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater

Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater

Author: Sarah Glendon Lyons

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1351577069

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How did literary aestheticism emerge in Victorian Britain, with its competing models of religious doubt and visions of secularisation? For Lyons, the aestheticism developed and progressively revised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Walter Pater (1839-1894) illuminates the contradictory impulses of modern secularism: on the one hand, a desire to cast itself as a form of neutrality or disinterestedness; on the other, a desire to affirm 'this world' as the place of human flourishing or even enchantment. The standard narrative of a 'crisis of faith' does not do justice to the fissured, uncertain quality of Victorian visions of secularisation. Precisely because it had the status of a confusing hypothesis rather than a self-evident reality, it provoked not only dread and melancholia, but also forms of fantasy. Within this context Lyons gives a fundamentally new account of the aims and nature of Victorian aestheticism, taking as a focus its deceptively simple claim that art is for art's sake first of all.