Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions: New Perspectives on Walter Pater

Description

Reflecting Walter Pater’s diverse engagements with literature, the visual arts, history, and philosophy, this collection of essays explores new interdisciplinary perspectives engaging readers and scholars alike to revisit methodologies, intertextualities, metaphysical positions, and stylistic features in the works of the Victorian essayist. A revised contextual portrait of Pater in Victorian culture questions representations of the detached aesthete. Current editorial and biographical projects show Pater as fully responsive to the emergence of modern consumer culture and the changes in readership in Britain and the United States. New critical views of rarely studied texts enhance the image of Pater as a cosmopolitan aesthete dialoguing with contemporary culture. Conceptual analysis of his texts brings new light to the aesthetic paradox embodied by Pater, between artistic detachment and immersion in the Heraclitean flux of life. Finally, aestheticism is redefined as proposing new artistic and linguistic synthesis by merging art forms and embracing interart poetics. About the Author Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada is Associate Professor at Rouen University. Her research and teaching interests include British literature, art criticism, and painting of the 1860s–1890s. Martine Lambert-Charbonnier is Associate Professor at the University of Sorbonne-Paris 4. Her field of research focuses on late-nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics in England, and especially on Walter Pater. Charlotte Ribeyrol is Associate Professor in nineteenth-century English literature at the University Paris-Sorbonne. She is also a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and a Marie Curie Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford (2016–2018). Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions- Front Cover Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Notes Bibliography PART I: Pater’s Modern Involvement: New Editorial and Biographical Approaches Chapter 1: Walter Pater and the New Media: The “Child” in the House Introduction Pater’s Patterns of Publication Pater’s Writing and Contemporary Publishing Mores Pater and the Journals: Three Case Studies Notes Bibliography Chapter 2: Privileging the Later Pater: The Choice of Copy-Text for the Collected Works Notes Bibliography Chapter 3: Habitus and the Multifaceted Self: Are There Different Paters? Pater’s Vision of Biography and the Notion of Habit From Habit to Habitus and Figuration Contrasting Images of the Aesthete Conclusion Notes Bibliography PART II: Intertextualities: The Aesthete and Contemporary Culture Chapter 4: Trace, Race and Grace: The Influence of Ernest Renan’s Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse on Pater’s Gaston de Latour Notes Bibliography Chapter 5: The Loveliness of Things and the Sorrow of the World: Art and Ethics in Pater and George Eliot Notes Bibliography Chapter 6: A Great Chain of Curiosity: Pater’s “Sir Thomas Browne” and its Nineteenth-Century British Context Notes Bibliography PART III: Modern Interactions: Aestheticism, Desire, and Artistic Detachment Chapter 7: “What an interesting period . . . is this we are in!”: Walter Pater and the Synchronization of the “Æsthetic Life” “The Æsthetic Life”: The Folios Aesthetic Experience Contra “Philosophy . . . turned suicidal” “The supposed son of the age”: Pater’s Metropolitan Aesthete “Everywhere . . . he will seek the face of man”: Embodying the Living Aesthete Notes Bibliography Chapter 8: Walter Pater’s Dialectical History of (Same-Sex) Desire: Queer Conclusions Thesis: The Medieval Culture of Desire Antithesis: The Return of the Repressed The Synthesis of the Subject of Desire Notes Bibliography Chapter 9: “Unimpassioned Passion”: Inner Excess and Exterior Restraint in Pater’s Rhetoric of Affect Rupture Within the Aesthetic Pater’s Interior Emotional Truth Passionate Confinement: The Limits of the Feeling Subject Against Affective Adequation Notes Bibliography PART IV: Interart Poetics: The Art of the Portrait Chapter 10: “What came of him?”: Change and Continuity in Pater’s Portraits Notes Bibliography Chapter 11: Walter Pater’s Lives of Philosophers: Inversions of the Aesthetic Life in “Coleridge’s Writings” and “Sebastian van Storck” Notes Bibliography Chapter 12: Reading the Mona Lisa Notes Bibliography Index