The Works of Walter Pater

The first volume of Pater's only novel, first published in 1885 and here reissued in his collected works of 1900–1.

Walter Pater (Author)

9781108034241, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 November 2011

256 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.33 kg

Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900–1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes with an additional volume of critical essays first published in The Guardian. This is the first of two volumes of Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater's only full-length fiction. A novel of ideas, combining history and philosophy with a fictional narrative set in the late Roman Empire, the work is a fascinating experiment in the boundaries of genre.

Part I: 1. 'The religion of Numa'
2. White-nights
3. Change of air
4. The tree of knowledge
5. The golden book
6. Euphuism
7. A pagan end
Part II: 8. Animula vagula
9. New Cyrenaicism
10. On the way
11. 'The most religious city in the world'
12. 'The divinity that doth hedge a king'
13. The 'mistress and mother' of palaces
14. Manly amusement.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]