First Published in 1981. Pater is certainly the least widely read and understood of any of the Victorian critics and creative writers, though there are signs of a coming revival of interest in him. Each of the discussions included in this issue devoted to Pater touches, in some significant way, on his "imaginative sense of fact," on his struggle with the objective ‘givens’ of experience (ideas or individuals), and on his efforts to co-opt or turn that Other into a reordered reflection of his own image.
Walter Pater's European Imagination addresses Pater's literary cosmopolitanism as the first in-depth study of his fiction in dialogue with European literature. Pater's short pieces of fiction, the so-called 'imaginary portraits', trace the development of the European self over a period of some two thousand years. They include elements of travelogue and art criticism, together with discourses on myth, history, and philosophy. Examining Pater's methods of composition, use of narrative voice, and construction of character, the book draws on all of Pater's oeuvre and includes discussions of a range of his unpublished manuscripts, essays, and reviews. It engages with Pater's dialogue with the visual portrait and problematises the oscillation between type and individual, the generic and the particular, which characterises both the visual and the literary portrait. Exploring Pater's involvement with nineteenth-century historiography and collective memory, the book positions Pater's fiction solidly within such nineteenth-century genres as the historical novel and the Bildungsroman, while also discussing the portraits as specimens of biographical writing. As the 'Ur-texts' from which generations of modernist life-writing developed, Pater's 'imaginary portraits' became pivotal for such modernist writers as Virginia Woolf and Harold Nicolson. Walter Pater's European Imagination explores such twentieth-century successors, together with French contemporaries like Sainte-Beuve and followers like Marcel Schwob.
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.
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.
