Walter Pater And Persons

Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.

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.

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

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.

Excerpt from Walter Pater Originally published eight years ago, as the initial volume in the Contemporary Men of Letters Series, this little book had the luck to be the first biographical study of Walter Pater. There have been other Lives since then, - Mr. Benson's competent and perceptive book, and Mr. Thomas Wrights bi-voluminous performance. Both of these writers have enjoyed special opportunities for acquaintance with the details of Pater's life to which the present writer could lay no claim, and they have turned them, the one to very good, and the other to very bad account. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Concise and illuminating articles explore Oscar Wilde's life and work in the context of the turbulent landscape of his time.