Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

by Charles Martindale (Editor), Elizabeth Prettejohn (Editor), Lene Østermark-Johansen (Editor)

Overview

Walter Pater's significance for the institutionalization of English studies at British universities in the nineteenth century is often overlooked. Addressing the importance of his volume Appreciations (1889) in placing English literature in both a national and an international context, this book demonstrates the indebtedness of the English essay to the French tradition and brings together the classic, the Romantic, the English and the European. With essays on drama, prose, and poetry, from Shakespeare and Browne, to Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Pater's contemporaries Rossetti and Morris, Appreciations exemplifies ideals of aesthetic criticism formulated in Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Subjectivity pervades Pater's essays on the English authors, while bringing out their exceptional qualities in a manner reaching far into twentieth-century criticism. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108835893
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/09/2023
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #144
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Charles Martindale is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He has published over a wide field, with particular emphasis on English-Classics literary relations, theoretical approaches to literature – in particular reception theory – and Kantian aesthetics and the importance of 'beauty'. He is the author of four books and editor or co-editor of fourteen collections.

Elizabeth Prettejohn is Professor of History of Art at the University of York. Her recent research centres on relationships between the arts of past and present, explored in The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture (2012) and Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (2017).

Lene Østermark-Johansen is Professor of English at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (2012) and of Walter Pater's European Imagination (2022). She has edited Pater's Imaginary Portraits for the Oxford Collected Works of Walter Pater (2019).

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction: Pater and english literature Charles Martindale and Elizabeth Prettejohn; Introduction to Part I: Part I. General: 1. 'Of the true family of Montaigne': appreciations and the essay tradition in english literature Kenneth Daley; 2. Unravelling Pater's english poet: the imaginary portrait as criticism Lene Østermark-Johansen; 3. Pater's Montaigne and the selfish reader Fergus McGhee; 4. Studies in European literature: Pater's cosmopolitan criticism Stefano Evangelista; 5. The 'Postscript' Ross Wilson; 6. Form, matter, and metaphysics in Walter Pater's essay on 'Style' Michael D. Hurley; 7. Walter Pater, second-hand stylist Scarlett Baron; Introduction to Part II: Part II. Individual authors: early moderns, romantics, contemporaries: 8. Pater's Shakespeare Alex Wong; 9. Pater and the quaintness of seventeenth-century english prose Kathryn Murphy; 10. 'Spiritual Form': Walter Pater's encounters with William Blake Luisa Calè; 11. Pater on Coleridge and Wordsworth Charles W. Mahoney; 12. Walter Pater, Charles Lamb and 'the value of reserve' Stacey McDowell; 13. Poetry in dilution: Pater, Morris and the future of english Marcus Waithe;14. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his school Elizabeth Prettejohn; Postscript Stephen Bann; Walter Pater and english studies: a select bibliography; Index.