Charles Martindale
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199240401
- eISBN:
- 9780191714337
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199240401.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The aim of this book is to encourage an interest in the tradition of modern Western aesthetics as it applies to poetry and the arts. It argues that the study of literature today is unduly dominated ...
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The aim of this book is to encourage an interest in the tradition of modern Western aesthetics as it applies to poetry and the arts. It argues that the study of literature today is unduly dominated by ideology critique, and that there is a need for a new recognition of the importance of beauty and the aesthetic in our response to the arts. It explores ways in which Kant’s aesthetic theory, as set out in the Critique of Judgement, still provides powerful tools of analysis for the modern critic. For example, the Kantian aesthetic — the free judgement of taste — carries a rebuke to the means/end rationality that is so widespread and so dangerous in the contemporary West. It shows that the Kantian ‘judgement of taste’ is a judgement of form and content together, and is thus not a version of formalism. It explores the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the responses to the arts, arguing that aesthetic judgements are not simply disguised judgements of other kinds. Finally, it urges on those writing about literature the value of aesthetic criticism — the attempt to isolate the unique aesthetic quality of artworks — as pioneered by Walter Pater, offering three essays on Latin poets as examples of what might be done.Less
The aim of this book is to encourage an interest in the tradition of modern Western aesthetics as it applies to poetry and the arts. It argues that the study of literature today is unduly dominated by ideology critique, and that there is a need for a new recognition of the importance of beauty and the aesthetic in our response to the arts. It explores ways in which Kant’s aesthetic theory, as set out in the Critique of Judgement, still provides powerful tools of analysis for the modern critic. For example, the Kantian aesthetic — the free judgement of taste — carries a rebuke to the means/end rationality that is so widespread and so dangerous in the contemporary West. It shows that the Kantian ‘judgement of taste’ is a judgement of form and content together, and is thus not a version of formalism. It explores the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the responses to the arts, arguing that aesthetic judgements are not simply disguised judgements of other kinds. Finally, it urges on those writing about literature the value of aesthetic criticism — the attempt to isolate the unique aesthetic quality of artworks — as pioneered by Walter Pater, offering three essays on Latin poets as examples of what might be done.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for ...
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This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.Less
This chapter begins with Walter Pater as a key figure, representing a gateway from impressionism to modernism and beyond. It discusses the implications of Pater's impressionist aesthetics for autobiography and for modernist writers; and explores his investment in the form of the ‘Imaginary Portrait’ in literature, arguing that while Imaginary Portraits can be found in earlier writing, they become increasingly important for modernist engagements with life‐writing. The relation between Paterian subjectivity and Victorian subjectivism is discussed, together with his scepticism about the boundary between fact and imagination.
Robert Macfarlane
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199296507
- eISBN:
- 9780191711916
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296507.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter shows that Johnson, Wilde, and Pater, like Eliot after them, shared the conviction that literature at its best would find profit in the circumstance that the words we receive from our ...
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This chapter shows that Johnson, Wilde, and Pater, like Eliot after them, shared the conviction that literature at its best would find profit in the circumstance that the words we receive from our linguistic community are ‘filled’ or ‘inhabited’ by the voices of others. Plagiarism, at its most intense and virtuous, came to be accommodated within later Victorian thought as a form of composition which also required this evacuation of self; this poetics of something approaching impersonality. Plagiarism was thought of, indeed, as an extreme form of empathy; an identification so acute that it required the near-total abolition of the writer's being.Less
This chapter shows that Johnson, Wilde, and Pater, like Eliot after them, shared the conviction that literature at its best would find profit in the circumstance that the words we receive from our linguistic community are ‘filled’ or ‘inhabited’ by the voices of others. Plagiarism, at its most intense and virtuous, came to be accommodated within later Victorian thought as a form of composition which also required this evacuation of self; this poetics of something approaching impersonality. Plagiarism was thought of, indeed, as an extreme form of empathy; an identification so acute that it required the near-total abolition of the writer's being.
Ian Small
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122418
- eISBN:
- 9780191671418
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122418.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book studies changes in the practice of literary criticism in the nineteenth century and locates those changes within wider movements in British intellectual culture. The growth of knowledge and ...
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This book studies changes in the practice of literary criticism in the nineteenth century and locates those changes within wider movements in British intellectual culture. The growth of knowledge and its subsequent institutionalization in universities produced new forms of intellectual authority. This book examines these processes in a wide variety of disciplines, including economics, historiography, sociology, psychology, and philosophical aesthetics, and explores their impact upon literary criticism. Its thesis is that the work of late nineteenth-century writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde can be best understood in terms of their engagement with, and reaction to, these general intellectual changes, a view which in its turn reveals the seriousness of their work.Less
This book studies changes in the practice of literary criticism in the nineteenth century and locates those changes within wider movements in British intellectual culture. The growth of knowledge and its subsequent institutionalization in universities produced new forms of intellectual authority. This book examines these processes in a wide variety of disciplines, including economics, historiography, sociology, psychology, and philosophical aesthetics, and explores their impact upon literary criticism. Its thesis is that the work of late nineteenth-century writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde can be best understood in terms of their engagement with, and reaction to, these general intellectual changes, a view which in its turn reveals the seriousness of their work.
J. B. BULLEN
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128885
- eISBN:
- 9780191671722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published in 1873, but by 1869 he had evolved a highly personal myth of the Renaissance which informed all his subsequent work. Each of ...
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Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published in 1873, but by 1869 he had evolved a highly personal myth of the Renaissance which informed all his subsequent work. Each of the essays which he wrote up to and including his essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1869) mark the evolution of the myth, and those which came afterwards, with the exception of the rather later ‘school of Giorgione’, are based upon premises about the nature of the Renaissance which Pater formulated in the 1860s. Pater is always quietly present in his writing, persistently colluding with his reader in such a way that his history possesses a curious sense of the contemporaneous. Pater is always aware of how, in historiography, subject and object are collapsed in the process of writing. The titles of the chapters that make up Studies in the History of the Renaissance suggest that it is predominantly a biographical history. In Pater’s essay on Johann Winckelmann, the Renaissance has lost almost entirely its historical connotations.Less
Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published in 1873, but by 1869 he had evolved a highly personal myth of the Renaissance which informed all his subsequent work. Each of the essays which he wrote up to and including his essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1869) mark the evolution of the myth, and those which came afterwards, with the exception of the rather later ‘school of Giorgione’, are based upon premises about the nature of the Renaissance which Pater formulated in the 1860s. Pater is always quietly present in his writing, persistently colluding with his reader in such a way that his history possesses a curious sense of the contemporaneous. Pater is always aware of how, in historiography, subject and object are collapsed in the process of writing. The titles of the chapters that make up Studies in the History of the Renaissance suggest that it is predominantly a biographical history. In Pater’s essay on Johann Winckelmann, the Renaissance has lost almost entirely its historical connotations.
Ian Small
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122418
- eISBN:
- 9780191671418
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122418.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines Walter Pater's career during a time when literary critics faced a serious crisis of authority. It evaluates Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) ...
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This chapter examines Walter Pater's career during a time when literary critics faced a serious crisis of authority. It evaluates Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as well as the criticisms it received. It presents a spectrum of quoted material which in fact comprises a large proportion of the novel's overall content. It notes that Pater's principal intellectual concern was to engage with the concepts of textual and historiographical authority. It discusses how Pater was attempting to undertake the kind of critical enterprise which Grant Allen had insisted on a decade earlier. However, this was no longer possible. In Marius the Epicurean and Plato and Platonism, Pater was trying to write works in which and for which authority existed in the author alone.Less
This chapter examines Walter Pater's career during a time when literary critics faced a serious crisis of authority. It evaluates Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as well as the criticisms it received. It presents a spectrum of quoted material which in fact comprises a large proportion of the novel's overall content. It notes that Pater's principal intellectual concern was to engage with the concepts of textual and historiographical authority. It discusses how Pater was attempting to undertake the kind of critical enterprise which Grant Allen had insisted on a decade earlier. However, this was no longer possible. In Marius the Epicurean and Plato and Platonism, Pater was trying to write works in which and for which authority existed in the author alone.
Kurt Lampe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691161136
- eISBN:
- 9781400852499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691161136.003.0009
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter talks about a significant re-appropriation of mainstream Cyrenaic ethics: Walter Pater's “new Cyrenaicism.” It suggests that Pater casts light on four elements that remain obscure in ...
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This chapter talks about a significant re-appropriation of mainstream Cyrenaic ethics: Walter Pater's “new Cyrenaicism.” It suggests that Pater casts light on four elements that remain obscure in ancient Cyrenaic doxography: “unitemporal pleasure,” the relation of hedonism to traditional virtues, the economy of pleasures and pains, and the Cyrenaic argument against the fear of death. The chapter also argues that the narrative framework of Pater's novel communicates how and why Cyrenaicism could attract someone better than arid doxography ever could. Cyrenaic ethics arises from the interaction of particular individuals' pre-philosophical inclinations with critical reasoning, and develops through the dynamic interaction of these two elements with the satisfying or dissatisfying feedback from experience.Less
This chapter talks about a significant re-appropriation of mainstream Cyrenaic ethics: Walter Pater's “new Cyrenaicism.” It suggests that Pater casts light on four elements that remain obscure in ancient Cyrenaic doxography: “unitemporal pleasure,” the relation of hedonism to traditional virtues, the economy of pleasures and pains, and the Cyrenaic argument against the fear of death. The chapter also argues that the narrative framework of Pater's novel communicates how and why Cyrenaicism could attract someone better than arid doxography ever could. Cyrenaic ethics arises from the interaction of particular individuals' pre-philosophical inclinations with critical reasoning, and develops through the dynamic interaction of these two elements with the satisfying or dissatisfying feedback from experience.
Kate Hext
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748646258
- eISBN:
- 9780748693849
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748646258.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter introduces Walter Pater's troubled individualism as a personal and intellectual problem. It presents a case for viewing Pater at the philosophical centre of British Aestheticism in the ...
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This chapter introduces Walter Pater's troubled individualism as a personal and intellectual problem. It presents a case for viewing Pater at the philosophical centre of British Aestheticism in the period 1864-1894 and uses Steven Lukes' seminal work of sociological history, Individualism, to define the importance of 'Romantic Individualism' in Pater's writings throughout his career. It argues that the philosophical spirit at the heart of Aestheticism has yet to be appreciated, asserting that Pater perceives the limitations of contemporary formal philosophical discourse and -- radically -- attempts to remake 'philosophy' so that it might account for the 'fugitive conditions' and spiritual uncertainties of emerging modern sensibility. This chapter sets out its argument in the cultural and intellectual contexts of mid- to late-Victorian Oxford; a tumultuous time at which the creation of university disciplines, challenges to the Church of England, and reconceptions of philosophical discourse in Oxford.Less
This chapter introduces Walter Pater's troubled individualism as a personal and intellectual problem. It presents a case for viewing Pater at the philosophical centre of British Aestheticism in the period 1864-1894 and uses Steven Lukes' seminal work of sociological history, Individualism, to define the importance of 'Romantic Individualism' in Pater's writings throughout his career. It argues that the philosophical spirit at the heart of Aestheticism has yet to be appreciated, asserting that Pater perceives the limitations of contemporary formal philosophical discourse and -- radically -- attempts to remake 'philosophy' so that it might account for the 'fugitive conditions' and spiritual uncertainties of emerging modern sensibility. This chapter sets out its argument in the cultural and intellectual contexts of mid- to late-Victorian Oxford; a tumultuous time at which the creation of university disciplines, challenges to the Church of England, and reconceptions of philosophical discourse in Oxford.
Charles Martindale
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199240401
- eISBN:
- 9780191714337
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199240401.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgement provides a compelling account of the character and conditions of possibility of what he terms ‘the judgement of taste’ (‘X is beautiful’). The ...
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This chapter argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgement provides a compelling account of the character and conditions of possibility of what he terms ‘the judgement of taste’ (‘X is beautiful’). The concern is less about expounding Kant in a merely exegetical or antiquarian spirit, than with using him as a guide to the way the aesthetic might be approached today. The chapter explores issues related to aesthetic autonomy, universal communicability, singularity of judgement, disinterest, genius and gender, and the absence of concepts in the aesthetic. It also asks what kind of criticism might be most consonant with the Kantian aesthetic (with an Ode of Horace as an example). It looks at aspects of the Aesthetic Movement of the later 19th century, a movement largely neglected within philosophical aesthetics, in particular, the writings of Walter Pater.Less
This chapter argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgement provides a compelling account of the character and conditions of possibility of what he terms ‘the judgement of taste’ (‘X is beautiful’). The concern is less about expounding Kant in a merely exegetical or antiquarian spirit, than with using him as a guide to the way the aesthetic might be approached today. The chapter explores issues related to aesthetic autonomy, universal communicability, singularity of judgement, disinterest, genius and gender, and the absence of concepts in the aesthetic. It also asks what kind of criticism might be most consonant with the Kantian aesthetic (with an Ode of Horace as an example). It looks at aspects of the Aesthetic Movement of the later 19th century, a movement largely neglected within philosophical aesthetics, in particular, the writings of Walter Pater.
Kate Hext
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748646258
- eISBN:
- 9780748693849
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748646258.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the ...
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Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'. Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism and Decadence, it argues that Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. This study has two main aims: i) to argue that 'late-Romantic Individualism' and not art is at the heart of Paterian Aestheticism and ii) to illustrate how Aestheticism understands itself in philosophical history, engaging with Romantic, Idealist and empiricist philosophies to redefine what philosophical thought can be under the conditions of modernity and to renegotiate the relationship between philosophy and literature. The way in which these interwoven discussions are focused through Pater simultaneously serves to reposition him in literary history. This is the first book-length study of how Pater was influenced by, variously appropriated, and challenged modern philosophies in Victorian Oxford. It is also the first exploration of how late nineteenth-century individualism developed through the reappropriation of philosophical discourses. In order to makes its case it engages substantially with Pater's unpublished manuscripts, which contain some of his most daring philosophical statements, and which have been seriously neglected by scholars working to the agenda of 'Pater as stylist' or 'Pater as purveyor of male-male desire' which has defined Pater studies for some time.Less
Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'. Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism and Decadence, it argues that Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. This study has two main aims: i) to argue that 'late-Romantic Individualism' and not art is at the heart of Paterian Aestheticism and ii) to illustrate how Aestheticism understands itself in philosophical history, engaging with Romantic, Idealist and empiricist philosophies to redefine what philosophical thought can be under the conditions of modernity and to renegotiate the relationship between philosophy and literature. The way in which these interwoven discussions are focused through Pater simultaneously serves to reposition him in literary history. This is the first book-length study of how Pater was influenced by, variously appropriated, and challenged modern philosophies in Victorian Oxford. It is also the first exploration of how late nineteenth-century individualism developed through the reappropriation of philosophical discourses. In order to makes its case it engages substantially with Pater's unpublished manuscripts, which contain some of his most daring philosophical statements, and which have been seriously neglected by scholars working to the agenda of 'Pater as stylist' or 'Pater as purveyor of male-male desire' which has defined Pater studies for some time.
Gould Warwick and Reeves Marjorie
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199242306
- eISBN:
- 9780191697081
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242306.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity, Theology
To the Victorians, the Renaissance was itself a concept in process of some rebirth. Those Victorian writers for whom Joachim of Fiore became something of a symbol of the proto-Renaissance as well as ...
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To the Victorians, the Renaissance was itself a concept in process of some rebirth. Those Victorian writers for whom Joachim of Fiore became something of a symbol of the proto-Renaissance as well as an avatar of change in their own iron age have a rhetoric from which their aspirations are inseparable. One common source for their rhetoric would seem to have been Jules Michelet. In Michelet's account of Joachim's life and doctrine, there was much to catch the eye of English writers searching for parallels between their own age and the proto-Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These ideas attracted certain Victorians. Thus John Addington Symonds in 1890 expressed his hopes for the future of art through a surprising conjunction of the Abbot Joachim and Walt Whitman. This chapter looks at Joachimism and changing interpretations of the Renaissance in Victorian England, focusing on the views of Symonds, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis concerning self-culture, Joachimism, and the Eternal Evangel.Less
To the Victorians, the Renaissance was itself a concept in process of some rebirth. Those Victorian writers for whom Joachim of Fiore became something of a symbol of the proto-Renaissance as well as an avatar of change in their own iron age have a rhetoric from which their aspirations are inseparable. One common source for their rhetoric would seem to have been Jules Michelet. In Michelet's account of Joachim's life and doctrine, there was much to catch the eye of English writers searching for parallels between their own age and the proto-Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These ideas attracted certain Victorians. Thus John Addington Symonds in 1890 expressed his hopes for the future of art through a surprising conjunction of the Abbot Joachim and Walt Whitman. This chapter looks at Joachimism and changing interpretations of the Renaissance in Victorian England, focusing on the views of Symonds, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis concerning self-culture, Joachimism, and the Eternal Evangel.
Ruth Livesey
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263983
- eISBN:
- 9780191734731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263983.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter traces this complex history of aestheticism, socialist aesthetics, and early modernism through a study of the development of William Morris's works in the later nineteenth century. ...
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This chapter traces this complex history of aestheticism, socialist aesthetics, and early modernism through a study of the development of William Morris's works in the later nineteenth century. Placing Morris's aesthetic development in the context of the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the discussion explore Morris's resistance to an emerging aesthetic that emphasized individual taste and consumption, rather than communal production. In his socialist essays, Signs of Change (1888) Morris developed an aesthetic continuum that enabled him to collapse the distinction between art and bodily labour and imagine a future of communal artistic production after the revolution. Both the radical nature of Morris's aesthetic and its preoccupation with productive masculinity are emphasized by contrasting his work to Wilde's essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891).Less
This chapter traces this complex history of aestheticism, socialist aesthetics, and early modernism through a study of the development of William Morris's works in the later nineteenth century. Placing Morris's aesthetic development in the context of the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the discussion explore Morris's resistance to an emerging aesthetic that emphasized individual taste and consumption, rather than communal production. In his socialist essays, Signs of Change (1888) Morris developed an aesthetic continuum that enabled him to collapse the distinction between art and bodily labour and imagine a future of communal artistic production after the revolution. Both the radical nature of Morris's aesthetic and its preoccupation with productive masculinity are emphasized by contrasting his work to Wilde's essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891).
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival ...
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This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival of interest in Lucretian materialism, the chapter shows that Paterian aestheticism often portrayed physical objects as “enminded,” attenuating distinctions between inward self and outward world. The chapter shows how this idea of a vitalized aesthetic object grew from a widespread cultural reevaluation of scientific and philosophical materialisms, including in the period’s sensation fiction, and draws a connection between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and James Sully’s writing on physiological perception of music, which was inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz. By contrast with George Eliot’s influential conception of the “web” of human relations described by the realist novel, writers such as Pater and Sully understood the figure of the web as made up of matter rather than of social relations.Less
This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival of interest in Lucretian materialism, the chapter shows that Paterian aestheticism often portrayed physical objects as “enminded,” attenuating distinctions between inward self and outward world. The chapter shows how this idea of a vitalized aesthetic object grew from a widespread cultural reevaluation of scientific and philosophical materialisms, including in the period’s sensation fiction, and draws a connection between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and James Sully’s writing on physiological perception of music, which was inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz. By contrast with George Eliot’s influential conception of the “web” of human relations described by the realist novel, writers such as Pater and Sully understood the figure of the web as made up of matter rather than of social relations.
Catherine Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719071447
- eISBN:
- 9781781701096
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719071447.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the ...
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This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less
This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Paul Turner
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122395
- eISBN:
- 9780191671401
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122395.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
If one is asked about Walter Pater himself one must, for a start, confess that his personality, whether in life or in his books, was not very engaging. A withdrawn, fastidious, unmarried don, who ...
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If one is asked about Walter Pater himself one must, for a start, confess that his personality, whether in life or in his books, was not very engaging. A withdrawn, fastidious, unmarried don, who loved travelling but hated being with strangers, he lived almost wholly in the world of art, literature, and philosophy, and spent most of his time as a writer laboriously searching for the perfect phrase. The resulting style can certainly be beautiful, but is apt to be soporific. Its lack of spontaneity deadens the reader’s responses, its steady tempo puts all narrative into slow motion, and its conscientious precision sometimes leads to sentences so long, and syntax so complicated, as to obscure the meaning. Pater’s thoughts seem to have revolved round a small group of images — crystal or precious stone, flame, focus, web, and rebirth or renaissance.Less
If one is asked about Walter Pater himself one must, for a start, confess that his personality, whether in life or in his books, was not very engaging. A withdrawn, fastidious, unmarried don, who loved travelling but hated being with strangers, he lived almost wholly in the world of art, literature, and philosophy, and spent most of his time as a writer laboriously searching for the perfect phrase. The resulting style can certainly be beautiful, but is apt to be soporific. Its lack of spontaneity deadens the reader’s responses, its steady tempo puts all narrative into slow motion, and its conscientious precision sometimes leads to sentences so long, and syntax so complicated, as to obscure the meaning. Pater’s thoughts seem to have revolved round a small group of images — crystal or precious stone, flame, focus, web, and rebirth or renaissance.
Stephen Cheeke
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198757207
- eISBN:
- 9780191817137
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198757207.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of the ways in which Walter Pater revised the aesthetic philosophy of the famous ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, particularly in Marius ...
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Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of the ways in which Walter Pater revised the aesthetic philosophy of the famous ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, particularly in Marius the Epicurean, to broaden and strengthen the ethical basis of a ‘religion of the visible’. Central to Pater’s philosophical aesthetics is the notion of ‘indifference’, which has both an aesthetic set of meanings (the supreme repose and serenity of the greatest artworks) and a parallel set of ethical meanings, in the ascetic disinterestedness, the imperturbability of mind or ataraxia, by which Pater himself was both attracted and repelled. The chapter examines the ways in which Pater’s writings engage with the problem of evil as a fault-line that runs between the aesthetic and the ethical, the element that undermines the value of ‘indifference’, and ultimately prevents the merging of the ethical and the aesthetic ideal.Less
Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of the ways in which Walter Pater revised the aesthetic philosophy of the famous ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, particularly in Marius the Epicurean, to broaden and strengthen the ethical basis of a ‘religion of the visible’. Central to Pater’s philosophical aesthetics is the notion of ‘indifference’, which has both an aesthetic set of meanings (the supreme repose and serenity of the greatest artworks) and a parallel set of ethical meanings, in the ascetic disinterestedness, the imperturbability of mind or ataraxia, by which Pater himself was both attracted and repelled. The chapter examines the ways in which Pater’s writings engage with the problem of evil as a fault-line that runs between the aesthetic and the ethical, the element that undermines the value of ‘indifference’, and ultimately prevents the merging of the ethical and the aesthetic ideal.
Catherine Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198701750
- eISBN:
- 9780191771460
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198701750.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Focusing on the founding figures of British aestheticism, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater, this chapter discusses how they embraced the identity of the aesthetic olfactif, the cultivation ...
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Focusing on the founding figures of British aestheticism, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater, this chapter discusses how they embraced the identity of the aesthetic olfactif, the cultivation of scent sensitivity, and the notion of the perfumed atmosphere produced by individual writers and literary or cultural schools, with this reflected in their influential critical prose. While Swinburne’s notorious Poems and Ballads (1866) apparently revels in heady perfumes, his own taste for light airy florals and dislike of musk clearly emerges in his subsequent poetry and prose, although his associations with his favoured scents are anything but conventional. Pater, another lover of delicate floral fragrance, refines Swinburne’s perception of the ‘scent’ of literature into a subtler critical language. His influential notion of the literary work’s ‘scented essence’ was adopted by admirers like Wilde and Symons, while his own writing was noted for its unmistakable ‘perfume’.Less
Focusing on the founding figures of British aestheticism, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater, this chapter discusses how they embraced the identity of the aesthetic olfactif, the cultivation of scent sensitivity, and the notion of the perfumed atmosphere produced by individual writers and literary or cultural schools, with this reflected in their influential critical prose. While Swinburne’s notorious Poems and Ballads (1866) apparently revels in heady perfumes, his own taste for light airy florals and dislike of musk clearly emerges in his subsequent poetry and prose, although his associations with his favoured scents are anything but conventional. Pater, another lover of delicate floral fragrance, refines Swinburne’s perception of the ‘scent’ of literature into a subtler critical language. His influential notion of the literary work’s ‘scented essence’ was adopted by admirers like Wilde and Symons, while his own writing was noted for its unmistakable ‘perfume’.
George Levine
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199608430
- eISBN:
- 9780191731709
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608430.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter focuses on one central characteristic of Darwin's writing: his use of paradox. Paradox is usually expressed in his work through what the book calls the double movement of Darwin's prose. ...
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This chapter focuses on one central characteristic of Darwin's writing: his use of paradox. Paradox is usually expressed in his work through what the book calls the double movement of Darwin's prose. Darwin confronts an inexplicable and startling phenomenon, like the instinct of comb-building bees, or the amazing power of the eagle's eye, and expresses awe and wonder at it; he nevertheless proceeds to explain how the phenomenon is compatible with natural selection and can be explained without reference to a world beyond nature. He produces an explanation, usually based on a narrative history of the phenomenon, that makes it both entirely natural, and as startling and wonderful as it was initially. The method is rather like that of the detective novel and gives science the same kind of emotional feel and appeal as great fiction. The chapter goes on to make connections between Darwin's use of paradox and the writings of Conan Doyle and such an apparently dissimilar writer as Walter Pater.Less
This chapter focuses on one central characteristic of Darwin's writing: his use of paradox. Paradox is usually expressed in his work through what the book calls the double movement of Darwin's prose. Darwin confronts an inexplicable and startling phenomenon, like the instinct of comb-building bees, or the amazing power of the eagle's eye, and expresses awe and wonder at it; he nevertheless proceeds to explain how the phenomenon is compatible with natural selection and can be explained without reference to a world beyond nature. He produces an explanation, usually based on a narrative history of the phenomenon, that makes it both entirely natural, and as startling and wonderful as it was initially. The method is rather like that of the detective novel and gives science the same kind of emotional feel and appeal as great fiction. The chapter goes on to make connections between Darwin's use of paradox and the writings of Conan Doyle and such an apparently dissimilar writer as Walter Pater.
Peter Jeffreys
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801447082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701252
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801447082.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter offers a parallel reading of C. P. Cavafy and Walter Pater to show how the former was influenced by the Victorian aesthete in terms of both a shared aesthetic historicism and an emerging ...
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This chapter offers a parallel reading of C. P. Cavafy and Walter Pater to show how the former was influenced by the Victorian aesthete in terms of both a shared aesthetic historicism and an emerging homoerotic sensibility. Before analyzing Cavafy's poetry in light of Pater's writings, the chapter discusses Pater's oeuvre and its relevance to the decadent movement. It then turns to a number of poems that reveal Cavafy's use of Paterian motifs and decadent themes. It also considers Pater's distillation of art criticism into his “euphuistic” writings as well as his Hellenism in relation to homosexuality, Cavafy's favoring of Rome as a setting for many of his poems, and his debt to Victorian classicism. Finally, it explores the interplay and amalgamation of pagan hedonism and Christian asceticism in Cavafy's work.Less
This chapter offers a parallel reading of C. P. Cavafy and Walter Pater to show how the former was influenced by the Victorian aesthete in terms of both a shared aesthetic historicism and an emerging homoerotic sensibility. Before analyzing Cavafy's poetry in light of Pater's writings, the chapter discusses Pater's oeuvre and its relevance to the decadent movement. It then turns to a number of poems that reveal Cavafy's use of Paterian motifs and decadent themes. It also considers Pater's distillation of art criticism into his “euphuistic” writings as well as his Hellenism in relation to homosexuality, Cavafy's favoring of Rome as a setting for many of his poems, and his debt to Victorian classicism. Finally, it explores the interplay and amalgamation of pagan hedonism and Christian asceticism in Cavafy's work.
Sebastian Lecourt
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198812494
- eISBN:
- 9780191850332
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198812494.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter explores how Walter Pater translated the political paradoxes of Arnoldian secularism into an ethical paradox of asceticism. In his 1885 historical novel, Marius the Epicurean, Pater ...
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This chapter explores how Walter Pater translated the political paradoxes of Arnoldian secularism into an ethical paradox of asceticism. In his 1885 historical novel, Marius the Epicurean, Pater tells the story of a second-century Roman who turns toward the new religion of Christianity because he sees in it the summation of his own pagan past. In this way Marius becomes a kind of conversion novel against conversion, one that rejects an ascetic, conversionist Christianity for a religion that embraces all the contradictory inheritances of history. In his very repudiation of ascetic sacrifice, however, Marius also becomes the sacrificial victim of his own aesthetic openness: a paragon of self-cultivation who is ultimately slain by his own refusal to reject any aspect of experience.Less
This chapter explores how Walter Pater translated the political paradoxes of Arnoldian secularism into an ethical paradox of asceticism. In his 1885 historical novel, Marius the Epicurean, Pater tells the story of a second-century Roman who turns toward the new religion of Christianity because he sees in it the summation of his own pagan past. In this way Marius becomes a kind of conversion novel against conversion, one that rejects an ascetic, conversionist Christianity for a religion that embraces all the contradictory inheritances of history. In his very repudiation of ascetic sacrifice, however, Marius also becomes the sacrificial victim of his own aesthetic openness: a paragon of self-cultivation who is ultimately slain by his own refusal to reject any aspect of experience.
