Collected Works of Walter Pater – serie

Correspondence is vol. ix in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life.For the first time, all the known correspondence of Walter Pater has been assembled and fully annotated, including letters exchanged with his main publisher, the Macmillans, for more than two decades. Pertinent letters written after his death by his sisters Clara and Hester Pater are also included. The Correspondence provides a richer, much more complete overview of Pater's academic, professional, and personal lives and demonstrates how vigorously he participated in some of the most important literary and cultural networks of the Victorian era.

Walter Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), is a landmark in Victorian intellectual and cultural history. The first book-length study of the Renaissance by a British writer, it was also described as the 'golden book' of British aestheticism by Oscar Wilde. Following its sensational debut, Pater oversaw three further editions under a new title, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The book's dynamic textual history describes, indeed precipitates, a fast-moving journey from high Victorian intellectualism towards decadence. This edition, based on the fourth edition (1893), recovers the book's exciting cultural context in its twenty-five-year evolution from periodical articles into one of the period's most influential volumes.With kaleidoscopic interests and an inquiring, speculative intelligence, Pater was steeped in the cultural and intellectual life of his age, responding creatively to what he read and saw to envisage new ways of engaging with the world. This edition reveals Pater's interests in contemporary arts and aesthetics, cutting-edge science, and emerging social sciences, and how these contributed to his radical revisioning of the history of the Renaissance. Responses to quattrocento artists are shot through with references to the art and literature of his own time; even Pater's most lyrical passages echo his reading in Victorian anthropology, psychology, and geomorphology. The Renaissance offered sensual enjoyments that transformed and re-enchanted the experience of modernity. Its arresting account of paintings, sculptures, and literature elevated intensity of experience as the goal of life while remaking the reputations of artists like Botticelli and Leonardo. This edition connects Pater's experience of Renaissance art to the temper of his own time, both directly, beginning with his first visit to Italy in 1865, and indirectly, through the work of the Pre-Raphaelites in whose circle he moved and who, like him, mediated the Renaissance to the modern world. Generously illustrated, it captures Pater's articulation of art and ideas now fundamental to western thought.

Gaston De Latour is the first volume in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life. Everywhere creating themes and resonances that span his narrative, the author's voice in Gaston de Latour is intensely personal; and the reader's experience is intimate, almost invasive. Although unfinished and first posthumously published in 1896, the novel was hailed by Richard Le Gallienne 'as sensitively beautiful as in his most perfect work, as rich in delicate colour and music, and as remarkable for exquisite detail.' This edition includes six additional suppressed chapters by Pater of varying degrees of completeness as a continuation of his interrupted originally-serialized text. This revised text (now a third longer than the posthumously published edition) appears here accompanied by a scholarly Introduction, Explanatory Annotation, and Apparatus Criticus. As it now stands, Pater's never-to-be-completed Gaston de Latour seems very much to belong to artistic modernism, like a 'conceptual' work of art-an idea not formally actualized but open to ranges of realization in the process of creation.

Imaginary Portraits is Volume 3 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life. Pater's Imaginary Portraits are among some of the most stylish and original pieces of short fiction in Victorian literature: portrayals of a series of handsome male protagonists across the ages of European history, set against a range of evocative European backdrops from Classical Greece to Medieval France, eighteenth-century Germany and modern England. Together, they constitute a remarkable testimony to Pater's profound understanding of centuries of cultural history, reworked in the hybrid genre of the imaginary portrait as sophisticated portrait miniatures of minor characters touched and affected by major moments in European history. They question central issues of nationhood and belonging, a Pan-European cultural identity, and the fate of the individual in the face of collective history. As formative texts for Modernist writers like Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, Pater's Imaginary Portraits had an impact which reached far beyond the nineteenth century.

Classical Studies is Volume 8 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life.Pater carried this spirit into his studies of Greek mythology and sculpture in the 1870s and 1880s--among the most important encounters of any Victorian writer with the classical tradition. Pater's classical studies offer revisionary accounts of the myths of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and undertake original interpretations of the history of Greek sculpture and tragedy. Deeply informed by, but never beholden to, the verities of classical scholarship, Pater approaches Greek myth and art from the perspective of what he famously called 'aesthetic criticism': with an eye to their beauty and the ways they speak to modern life. Pater's interpretations of classical culture cut against the grain of the high Victorian appreciation of ancient Greece, which imagined a placid world of reason and pure white beauty. Like his contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, Pater is by contrast attentive to the dark side of antiquity, highlighting its depths of emotion, its dissident sexuality, its gaudy colours, and its transgressive challenges to the ruling order. These essays were highly influential among Pater's younger contemporaries, and would later inform works like James Joyce's Ulysses, which likewise traces links between ancient Greece and modern life.