Book Description
Walter Pater is increasingly gaining recognition as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century culture. William F. Shuter shows that Pater authorized rereadings of his work in an effort to rewrite his own literary and cultural past. Drawing on unpublished manuscript material, Shuter shows how Pater's later work can serve, paradoxically, as an introduction to the earlier. Such a rereading of Pater's work uncovers patterns of continuity and anticipation that decisively alter our understanding of Pater and his writings. ... Read more

Book Description
Just over a century after his death, Walter Pater's critical reputation now stands as high as it has ever been. In the English-speaking world, this has involved recovery from the widespread neglect and indifference which attended his work in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, however, enthusiastic disciplies such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the German-speaking world and Charles Du Bos in France, helped to fuel a growing awareness of his writings as central to the emergence of modernist literature. Translations of works like Imaginary Portraits, established his distinctive voice as an aesthetic critic and his novel, Marius the Epicurean, was enthusiastically received in Paris in the 1920s and published in Turin on the eve of the second world war.This collection traces the fortunes of Pater's writings in these three major literatures and their reception in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. ... Read more

Book Description
Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. ... Read more

Book Description
The "Conclusion" to The Renaissance advises the responsive critic to consider carefully "the various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age." Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire brings together twenty-one varied, contentious, informative essays that confirm Pater's ongoing power to captivate and challenge readers.

The interdisciplinary breadth of the collection demonstrates that the critical culture of Pater studies is always multifaceted--inviting diverse theoretical perspectives yet also demanding that any paradigm of analysis (feminist, new historicist, aesthetic, queer theory, formalist, biographical, Foucauldian) be tested and redefined.

Scholars from five different countries reconsider Pater's career and canon, the reception of his works, the intersections of genre, gender, and aesthetics, and the implications of Pater's writings--in aesthetics, fiction, philosophy, archaeology, art history--for contemporary cultural studies. ... Read more

Book Description
Biography of the noted 19th century British critic and literary scholar. ILLUS.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Books for College Libraries; Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pater's Splendid Critique...
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Paterians, Wildeans, and students of 19th Century cultural history--take note: this is one of the finest tomes on Pater available.

Dr. McGrath's critique of Pater is spot-on with a closely read explication and an excellent grasp of Romanticism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism.Plus, McGrath writes clearly and in an entertaining manner.

Highly recommended.
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Book Description
Out of print for decades, the enchanting classics in this new edition of Walter Pater's Imaginary Portraits will be welcomed by teachers and students of literature, art history, and aesthetics. First published in 1887, these "imaginary portraits" are not biographies, but fictionalized accounts of historic figures, written by this esteemed nineteenth-century scholar of Renaissance art and literature. Each shares a common search for a new aesthetic, a pursuit of beauty that anticipated the modern movement in prose and poetry and helped to define aesthetics in the twentieth century. Pater's earnest philosophy of beauty inspired many of the earliest voices of modernism, from his student Oscar Wilde to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. This treasured edition includes such celebrated works as The Child in the House, out of print since 1904, and the unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour.

Co-published with the School of Visual Arts as part of the Aesthetics Today series. ... Read more