Harold Bloom's selection of Pater's writings brings together in one volume the most important sections and passages from The Renaissance, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, Plato and Platonism, Greek Studies, and Sketches and Reviews, as well as "The Child in the House." Pater, the chief aesthetician and literary critic of Victorian England, brought his powerful imagination to bear on a wide range of subjects: from the drama of Euripides to the painters of the Renaissance, from the Romantic poets to the pre-Raphaelites, from Plato to Oscar Wilde. In the twentieth century, Pater's theories of art and literature exerted a strong inluence on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stevens.
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.
Correspondence is vol. ix 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 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. For the first time, all the known correspondence of Walter Pater has been assembled and fully annotated, including letters exchanged with his main publisher, the Macmillans, for more than two decades. Pertinent letters written after his death by his sisters Clara and Hester Pater are also included. The Correspondence provides a richer, much more complete overview of Pater's academic, professional, and personal lives and demonstrates how vigorously he participated in some of the most important literary and cultural networks of the Victorian era.
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.
Classical Studies is Volume 8 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 carried this spirit into his studies of Greek mythology and sculpture in the 1870s and 1880s--among the most important encounters of any Victorian writer with the classical tradition. Pater's classical studies offer revisionary accounts of the myths of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and undertake original interpretations of the history of Greek sculpture and tragedy. Deeply informed by, but never beholden to, the verities of classical scholarship, Pater approaches Greek myth and art from the perspective of what he famously called 'aesthetic criticism': with an eye to their beauty and the ways they speak to modern life. Pater's interpretations of classical culture cut against the grain of the high Victorian appreciation of ancient Greece, which imagined a placid world of reason and pure white beauty. Like his contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, Pater is by contrast attentive to the dark side of antiquity, highlighting its depths of emotion, its dissident sexuality, its gaudy colours, and its transgressive challenges to the ruling order. These essays were highly influential among Pater's younger contemporaries, and would later inform works like James Joyce's Ulysses, which likewise traces links between ancient Greece and modern life.
