The Works of Walter Pater

A series of fictionalised historical portraits, first published in 1887–9 and here reissued in Pater's collected works of 1900–1.

Walter Pater (Author)

9781108034265, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 November 2011

332 pages
21.6 x 1.9 x 14 cm, 0.42 kg

Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and aesthetic experience. He brought his 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 of his major works with an additional volume of critical essays. Following the publication of his novel in 1885, Pater continued his experiments with thinking through fiction in these short portraits of historical figures, published as Imaginary Portraits (1887) and Gaston de Latour (1888–9). The theme of talented, beautiful young men who die young reflects Pater's aesthetic outlook.

Imaginary Portraits: 1. A prince of court painters
2. Denys l'Auxerrois
3. Sebastian van Storck
4. Duke Carl of Rosenmold
Gaston de Latour: 1. A clerk in orders
2. Our Lady's church
3. Modernity
4. Peach-blossom and wine
5. Suspended judgment
6. Shadows of events
7. The lower pantheism.

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