DOCSLIB.ORG

9781501707247.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
9781501707247.Pdf Transfigured World · CAROLYN WILLIAMS · Transfigured World · WALTER PATER'S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM · Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1989 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Carolyn, 1950– Transfigured world: Walter Pater’s aesthetic historicism / Carolyn Williams p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8014-2151-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-0724-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894—Aesthetics. 2. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894— Knowledge—History. 3. Historicism. I. Title. PR5138.A35W5 1989 824'.8—dc20 89-42883 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For Cecil Lang Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction I Part One • Opening Conclusions II I. "That Which Is Without" 14 2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling" 18 3. Aestheticism 26 4. Answerable Style 37 5. Iiistoricism 46 6. Aesthetic Iiistoricism and "Aesthetic Poetry" 57 7. The Poetics of Revival 68 Part Two • Figural Strategies in Th e Renaissance 79 I. Legend and Iiistoricity 82 2. Myths of Iiistory: Th e Last Supper 94 3. The Iiistoricity of Myth 103 4. Myths of Iiistory: The Mona Lisa III 5. Types and Figures 123 6. Low and Iiigh Relief: "Luca Della Robbia" 143 7. The Senses of Relief 153 • vii • · viii · Contents Part Three · Historical Novelty and Marius the Epicurean 169 l. The Transparent Hero 172 2. Autobiography of the Zeitgeist 184 3. The Transcendental Induction 193 4. Typology as Narrative Form 202 5. Typological Ladders 213 6. Christian Historicism 219 7. Literary History as "Appreciation" 224 Part Four · "Recovery as Reminiscence": The Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism 235 l. Histories of Myth: The Greek Studies 238 2. The House Beautiful and Its Interpreter 247 3. The Philosophy of Mythic Form 249 4. The History of Philosophy 258 5. The Anecdote of the Shell 266 6. Dialogue and Dialectic 270 7. Paterian Recollection: The Anagogic Mind 277 Afterword 282 Index 285 Acknowledgments Sections 4, 5, and 6 of Part Three appeared under the title "Typology as Narrative Form" in English Literature in Transition 2TI (1984), n-33. I am grateful to the editor, Robert Langenfeld, for permission to reprint. Two institutions have materially supported this work. The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College provided a year's fel­ lowship, during which the manuscript was begun, and the community extending from that institution has been lastingly valuable to me. The Humanities Foundation of Boston University then freed me from teaching duties for a semester, when the argument was ready for a finalreformulation. I particularly thank William Carroll, who directed the Humanities Foundation and its Society of Fellows toward the model of a truly interdisciplinary conversation. Other colleagues and friends at Boston University sustained the work over the years of its production: Laurence Breiner, Patricia B. Craddock, Albert Gilman, Eugene Goodheart, Misia Landau, John T. Matthews, Katherine O'Connor, and David Wagenknecht. I am grateful to them for their advice, their support, their responses to chapters in progress, and their good company. My dedication celebrates a long-standing intellectual and personal debt to Cecil Lang. Walter Pater's prose is only one of the many gustatory pleasures I owe to his great generosity. His guidance repaired the work as often as his wit repaired me. Rachel Jacoff's reading of Dante is more present in these pages than their nineteenth-century focus would make evident. I thank her as well for many other gifts of a compendious intelligence, now invisibly at work in this book. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick strengthened and enabled the work throughout, . ix • · x · Acknowledgments in part by inspiring a vision of future work to be done-for which I am especially grateful. Nancy Waring, too, contributed important generative questions and continuing help in answering them. Other friends have steadfastly made it possible for me to imagine an audience by being one: Joyce Van Dyke, Barbara Harman, Lin Reicher, and Eleanor Ringel. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, and Mary Poovey have repeatedly aided my thinking and writing. I owe a special debt to the members of the ID 450 Collective, who-both collectively and individually-encouraged the practice of form and voice. Writing has become a different sort of pleasure with Mary B. Campbell, Susan Carlisle, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Anne Janowitz, Nancy Munger, Beth O'Sullivan, Helaine Ross, Eve Sedg­ wick, Deborah Swedberg, Martha Sweezy, Nancy Waring, and Patricia Yaeger in mind. And Bernhard Kendler of Cornell University Press contributed to the completion of this project in many invaluable ways. I thank him for the acuity of his insight, for deft intervention at crucial moments, and for suggestions of remarkable background reading. I am grateful to my parents, Mary and James Williams, and my sister, Nancy Williams: their support has been both incalculable and essential. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my husband and colleague, Michael McKeon. I am happy that my debts to him will continue to appreciate as time passes. CAROLYN WILLIAMS Boston, Massachusetts Abbreviations Quotations from Pater's works, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the ten-volume Library Edition (London: Macmillan, 1910; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1973), abbreviated as follows: A Appreciations EG Essays from the "Guardian" GL Gaston de Latour GS Greek Studies IP Imaginary Portraits ME I Marius the Epicurean, volume I ME II Marius the Epicurean, volume II MS Miscellaneous Studies pp Plato and Platonism R The Renaissance In addition, I have quoted extensively from "Aesthetic Poetry," which was originally part of "Poems by William Morris" (Westminster Review, 1868). The essay is now most conveniently seen in Harold Bloom's edition of Pater, abbreviated here as follows: B Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (1974; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) . xi Transfigured World Poetry projects, above the realities of its time, a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that transfigured world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificialor "earthly paradise." -WALTERPATER Introduction • I want to begin with a few words about the subtitle of this book: "Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism." The problematic and seem­ ingly contradictory usage of the term "historicism" first alerted me to its great formal and conceptual potential. On the one hand, the term is often used to signal an attempt to know an object (a literary work, for example) by placing it within its contemporary historical context, and in this sense historicism seeks to define the specific historicity of the object. But on the other hand, the term often signals skepticism (whether mild or radical) about the possibility of such historical knowledge, and in this sense "historicism" is taken to be the equivalent of "relativism." These two senses represent contradic­ tory but related positions-both of them reductive-and in Part One, section 5 I take the contradiction into account by defining historicism 1 in a more complex and flexible way, as a double dialectic. Other senses of the term are also relevant to this study. In recent years the "new historicism" has succeeded "new literary history" as the dominant model in a continuing and intensifying effort to place literary and historical study in a fruitful mutual relation. Beginning with a consideration of the problematic involvement of text and con­ text, one might regard the new historicism (in broad terms) as a re­ newed approach to contextual study which is informed by the analyti­ cal finesse of recent psychoanalytic, feminist, and poststructuralist theory. This book instead aims to consider one episode in the literary history of historicism itself. It is an especially interesting episode because Pater's historicism accompanies the aestheticism that has • I • • 2 • Introduction been taken to grant the work of art a supposed "autonomy." However, Pater's notion of aesthetic autonomy is strictly limited, for though he does argue that the work of art should be free from utilitarian appropria­ tion, he does not propose to appreciate it apart from its historical con­ text. The interrelation of aestheticism and historicism in Pater's work is my subject throughout, especially in the theoretical discussions of Part One. "Aesthetic historicism" names that interrelation. In specificallyliterary studies, "historicism" often refers to a certain literary form familiar to readers of early-twentieth-century ("high") modernism. The examples of Eliot's Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Joyce's Ulysses, and Woolf's Orlando will serve to indicate the variety within this form of historical or literary-historical pastiche. A critique and revision of these strategies of composition-and the totalizing perspective they establish-is now being conducted under the aegis of the "postmodern," and though they must be distinguished from one another, this critique reminds me of Pater's own, late-nineteenth­ century assertion of the re-collective and conservative impulses in­ volved in any modernism. For Pater saliently argues that modernism is a recurrent phenomenon in history. His "appreciation" of composite art forms is one way he recognizes the particular sort of aesthetic value that accrues only through the repetitions and displacements of historical time. The critical voice that we in tum recognize as Paterian is just such a composite re-creation.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism
    Transfigured World · CAROLYN WILLIAMS · Transfigured World · WALTER PATER'S AESTHETIC HISTORICISM · Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1989 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Carolyn, 1950– Transfigured world: Walter Pater’s aesthetic historicism / Carolyn Williams p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8014-2151-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-0724-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894—Aesthetics. 2. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894— Knowledge—History. 3. Historicism. I. Title. PR5138.A35W5 1989 824'.8—dc20 89-42883 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For Cecil Lang Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction I Part One • Opening Conclusions II I. "That Which Is Without" 14 2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling" 18 3. Aestheticism 26 4. Answerable Style 37 5. Iiistoricism 46 6. Aesthetic Iiistoricism and "Aesthetic Poetry" 57 7. The Poetics of Revival 68 Part Two • Figural Strategies in Th e Renaissance 79 I. Legend and Iiistoricity 82 2. Myths of Iiistory: Th e Last Supper 94 3. The Iiistoricity of Myth 103 4.
    [Show full text]
  • Pater's Portraits
    [Expo. 3.1 (2009) 23–40] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v3i1.23 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 Pater’s Portraits: The Aesthetic Hero in 1890 (Part II) GERALD MONSMAN University of Arizona [email protected] Abstract In conjunction with Walter Pater’s unfinished manuscript, “Gaudioso, the Second,” recently published in Expositions (Monsman 2008), a sec- ond manuscript fragment from among Pater’s papers is now also printed here for the first time: “Tibalt the Albigense” (circa 1890). Not long after Pater began research for his never-finished second novel,Gaston de Latour (1888/1995), he simultaneously began reading for his imaginary portrait of “Tibalt,” dealing with the prelude to the bloody Albigensian crusade. Like Gaston, “Tibalt” was to be set in France against the turbulent back- ground of religious warfare. But in contrast to the brutality of sectarian slaughter in Gaston, Pater elevates aesthetic experience to a mystical and Platonically mythic level of enchantment. From his first aesthetic portrait, “The Child in the House” (1878)—a defense of his aestheticism inStudies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)—to “Tibalt the Albigense,” Pater’s fascination with the transformative power of beauty at the turning- points of religious/cultural history is the major thrust of all his writings. Keywords: Albigensian Heresy, Aesthetic Hero, Walter Pater, Aestheticism, Medieval France Walter Pater, essayist and critic, began publishing fiction belatedly in his career, in his thirty-eighth year, when he wrote the poetically evocative allegory of “The Child in the House” (1878). It is a covert self-portrait of his fascination with beauty and pain that developed as he grew up in a quintessentially Victorian home.
    [Show full text]
  • THE POLITICS of AESTHETICISM: PATER's “IMAGINATIVE” SYNTHESIS of EMPIRICISM and IDEALISM THROUGH HERACLITUS and KANT Kanar
    THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICISM: PATER’S “IMAGINATIVE” SYNTHESIS OF EMPIRICISM AND IDEALISM THROUGH HERACLITUS AND KANT Kanarakis Yannis ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI School of English Language and Literature CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: PATER AND THE EMPIRICAL PARADIGM OF HERACLITUS 1.1. The Spirit of the Age and Heraclitean Flux 17 1.2. The Heraclitean Doctrine 24 1.3. Heraclitus and Science in the “Conclusion” 33 1.4. Heraclitean Empiricism: Associationism and Sensationalism in the “Conclusion” 47 1.5. The Materialistic Ethics of Heraclitean Flux and Relativity 62 1.6. The Aesthete and the Scientist 71 1.7. Pater, Darwin, and Heraclitus 78 1.8. The Science of Imaginative Prose: Darwin and the Essay 84 1.9. The “Relish” of Flux: Abstraction in the Renaissance 95 1.10. Heraclitus and Abstraction 103 CHAPTER II: PATER AND THE IDEALIST PARADIGM OF KANT 2.1. The Paradigm of J. S. Mill 115 2.2. Kant’s “Empiricism”: Victorian Responses to the German Philosopher 120 2.3. Pater and the “Least Transcendental Parts of Kant” 131 2.4. The A Priori and Herbert Spencer 143 2.5. Aesthesis and Aesthetics 155 2.6. The Centripetal and the Centrifugal 162 2.7. The Purposiveness of Pater’s “Imaginative Reason” 171 2.8. A Model for the Individual 182 2.9. The Form of Copernican Revolution 191 2.10. Empirical Relativity and Idealist Functionalism 202 2.11. The Last Romantic 210 2.12. Heraclitus and Kant: Classicism and Romanticism 216 CHAPTER III: PATER’S SYNTHETIC VISION: MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, AND THE “BEATA URBS” 3.1.
    [Show full text]
  • Walter Pater: Humanist
    University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, British Isles English Language and Literature 1970 Walter Pater: Humanist Richmond Crinkley Folger Shakespeare Library Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Crinkley, Richmond, "Walter Pater: Humanist" (1970). Literature in English, British Isles. 31. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/31 WALTER PATER: HUMANIST This page intentionally left blank WALTER PATER: HUMANIST J.: :1 Richmond Crinkley The University Press of Kentucky Standard Book Number 8131-1221-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 70-ll98ll COPYRIGHT© 1970 BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY A statewide cooperative scholarly publishing agency serving Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, Kentucky State College, Morehead State University, Murray State University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506 CONTENTS Preface tx CHAPTER ONE The Renaissance I CHAPTER TWO The Critic of Form 33 CHAPTER THREE The Living & the Dead 69 CHAPTER FOUR The House Beautiful & the Cathedral
    [Show full text]
  • Selected Readings on Augmented Reality, Ekphrasis, and Michael Field Robert P
    West Chester University Digital Commons @ West Chester University Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Sight and Song Mixed Reality Spring 5-23-2017 Selected Readings on Augmented Reality, Ekphrasis, and Michael Field Robert P. Fletcher West Chester University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/sight_song_series Part of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Performance Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, and the Visual Studies Commons Recommended Citation Fletcher, R. P. (2017). Selected Readings on Augmented Reality, Ekphrasis, and Michael Field. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/sight_song_series/8 This Bibliography is brought to you for free and open access by the Sight and Song at Digital Commons @ West Chester University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ West Chester University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sight and Song Augmented: Poetry and Painting in Mixed Reality Selected Readings on Augmented Reality, Ekphrasis, and Michael Field Augmented Reality Barba, Evan, Blair MacIntyre and Elizabeth D. Mynatt. “Here We Are! Where Are We? Locating Mixed Reality in the Age of the Smartphone.” Proceedings of the IEEE 100.4 (April 2012): 929-936. Berry, Marsha and Omega Goodwin. “Poetry 4 U: Pinning poems under/over/through the streets.” New Media and Society 15.6 (2012): 909-929. Print. Bolter, Jay David and Maria Engberg.
    [Show full text]
  • Walter Pater (1839-1894)
    WALTER PATER (1839-1894) Walter Horatio Pater was, along with A. C. Swinburne, Simeon Solomon, and Whistler, one of the controversial nineteenth-century English aesthetes. Like them he was much influenced by continental ideas and art, and like Swinburne he began publishing as a critic in the journals in the 1860s. Valuing the form and architectonics of art and life, and the aesthetic experience they allegedly offered above any moral or religious messages in his early work, Pater explicitly resisted Matthew Arnold’s and John Ruskin’s spiritual Elliott & Fry. Walter Pater. and political agendas. Pursuing his notion of the Half-plate glass copy “aesthetic critic” (1873), Pater created a unique series of negative. Circa 1890s, National Portrait Gallery, article-essays in the press from 1866, first on aesthetics London. and on modern English poets (Coleridge and William Morris), and then, from 1869, on Renaissance art, philosophy, and literature. In 1873 he shaped a Macmillan book out of some of these. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, despite its title, deployed the last section of the Morris article as its Conclusion and spanned the twelfth century to the eighteenth. Notable for their artfully honed prose, its chapters, like a modern-day Vasari, conflated biography, history, and character to develop a genre that Pater later called “imaginary portraits” and “appreciations.” Likewise in the 1880s he explicated the aesthetics of prose in “Style” (1888), an article indebted to his recent review of Flaubert. With Studies 1 Pater attracted both admiration and revulsion, resulting in a gap of a dozen years before publication of his next book, an historical novel, Marius the Epicurean, an attempt to explain the hedonism for which Studies had been castigated.
    [Show full text]
  • Brasenose College Archives Walter Horatio Pater
    BRASENOSE COLLEGE ARCHIVES WALTER HORATIO PATER Biographical information 4 Aug 1839 Born at 1 Honduras Terrace, Commercial Road, Stepney, London Son of Dr Richard Glode Pater and Maria Hill 1853-1858 Educated at King's School, Canterbury 11 Jun 1858 Matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford, aged 18 1862 Awarded 2 Class in Literae Humaniores and B.A. 5 Feb 1864 Elected to a (Founders) Fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford 1865 Awarded M.A. 1867-1883 Tutor at Brasenose College (Classics) 1885 Curator of the University Galleries 30 Jul 1894 Died; memorial in Brasenose College Chapel Works included: Winckelmann, 1867 Aesthetic Poetry, 1868 Notes on Leonardo da Vinci, 1869 Fragment on Sandro Botticelli, 1870 Michelangelo, 1871 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1873 Marius the Epicurean, 1885 Imaginary Portraits, 1887 Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, 1889 Emerald Uthwart (New Review), 1892 Plato and Platonism, 1893 Apollo in Picardy (Harper’s Magazine), 1893 The Child in the House, 1894 Some Churches in France (19th Century), 1894 Miscellaneous Studies, 1895 Greek Studies, 1895 Pascal (Contemporary Review), 1895 Gaston de la Tour (Macmillan’s Magazine, June to October 1888), 1896 Essays in the Guardian, 1896 Collected Works (Edition de Luxe) 1900-01 BRASENOSE COLLEGE ARCHIVES WALTER HORATIO PATER See also: Brasenose Quartercentenary Monograph XIV.2 ‘Nine Brasenose Worthies’ by John Buchan (Walter Horatio Pater, pp. 23-30) Brasenose College Library Records (not yet catalogued): 2 – Register of Library Library Borrowers, with
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking the Cultural Divide: Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, and the Legacies of Wordsworthian Aesthetics
    Rethinking the Cultural Divide: Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, and the Legacies of Wordsworthian Aesthetics NOEL B. JACKSON Massachusetts Institute of Technology In discussions of the division between high art and mass culture, few notions have secured more consensus than that concerning the basis upon which we generally make such distinctions in the first place. In an argument that has proved exceedingly influential for our theoretical understanding of the so-called cultural divide, Pierre Bourdieu in Dis- tinction (1979) described as the defining characteristic of elite aesthetics “a refusal of ‘impure’ taste and of aisthesis (sensation), the simple, prim- itive form of pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses.”1 On this (widely shared) account, the refusal of sensation represents not merely a site but the primary source of the cultural divide, which has both its origin and its strongest basis in the rupture between sensuous and re- flective aesthetic experience. If the distinction between elite and popular culture is now com- monly regarded as having its theoretical basis in the refusal of sensa- tion, critics are just as united in dating this refusal to the period of European Romanticism. In the widely cited “Postscript” to Distinction, Bourdieu finds the theoretical grounding for “high” literary aesthetics in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), particularly in Kant’s insistence that the basis for the subjective universal validity of aesthetic experience resides not in bodily sense but rather in the higher cognitive For valuable assistance with this essay, I wish to thank Marshall Brown, Jim Chandler, Bo-Mi Choi, Charles Rzepka, Jon Sachs, the editors of and peer reviewers for Modern Philology, and the audiences at several forums in which I presented early versions of this work, including the 2002 International Conference on Romanticism in Tallahas- see, Florida, the MIT History/Literature Workshop, and the Romantic Literature and Culture Seminar at Harvard University.
    [Show full text]
  • University of Copenhagen, October 2011
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Copenhagen University Research Information System Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture Østermark-Johansen, Lene Publication date: 2012 Document version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (APA): Østermark-Johansen, L. (2012). Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture. København: Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Download date: 08. apr.. 2020 Lene Østermark-Johansen Summary of Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 364 pp, 109 illustrations Submitted for the degree of Dr. Phil. at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, October 2011 Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture is both a monograph on the Victorian writer Walter Pater (1839-94) and an attempt to place his writings and his ideas of art and style within the context of the history of aesthetics from the Renaissance until the late nineteenth century. As indicated by its title, the book is interdisciplinary: the visual arts and literature, both prose and fiction. My juxtaposition of language and sculpture in the title encompasses a range of different aspects of the literary and the sculptural in Pater’s writings: Sculpture as an art form The plasticity of language and prose style Sculpture as metaphor The critical language employed in discussions of individual works of sculpture Sculpture as a state of mind, an image of the process of thought The etymological and semantic stratification of language as essentially sculptural My definition of sculpture is broad and covers far more than three-dimensional sculpture in the round.
    [Show full text]
  • Walter Pater's Conception of the 'Central Love-Poetry of Provence'
    Walter Pater’s conception of the ‘central love-poetry of Provence’ (1860-1890) Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada To cite this version: Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada. Walter Pater’s conception of the ‘central love-poetry of Provence’ (1860-1890). di/segni, Università degli Studi di Milano, 2013, Provence and the British Imagination, pp.95-104. hal-02093094 HAL Id: hal-02093094 https://hal-normandie-univ.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02093094 Submitted on 8 Apr 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 1 Walter Pater’s representation of “the central love-poetry of Provence” Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, Rouen – ERIAC Walter Pater’s construction of Provençal poetry is part of his larger project to uncover the Greek and pagan elements in the Middle Ages which to him announced the Renaissance. But Pater’s discussion of the literature of the troubadours also helps him legitimize contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and “Aesthetic” artists in a context of criticism levelled against their works. Defending those recent trends in literature and painting is one of Pater’s main concerns, and he considers Provence as a literary and aesthetic tradition that originates in Greece and comprises contemporary artists and poets such as William Morris and D.G.
    [Show full text]
  • Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walter Pater: the Labyrinths of Transience 85
    Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walter Pater: The Labyrinths of Transience 85 ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.111.09Hopkins G.M.:821.111.09Pater W. DOI: 10.4312/an.49.1-2.85-108 Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walter Pater: The Labyrinths of Transience Mirko Starčević Abstract Transience forming life’s very essence left an indelible mark on the creative explorations of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walter Pater. The permanently indeterminable presence of mutability made both of them face the umbrous and unknowable aspect of death, thus revealing unto them the task of determining the role of art in life ruled by ceaseless cor- rosion. Pater accepts the flux of mutability as the primary particle in the revelatory act of the authentic creative experience. The power of that which is frolicsome in art augments the constitution of life’s essence submerged in the unsettled condition of fate. Hopkins the priest particularly in his theoretic excursions recognizes in art itself only an approximate value to the timeless grandeur of God’s ubiquity. His poetry, however, presents a dissimilar narrative. The poetic image that Hopkins forges corresponds to the mode of exposed indi- viduality of the Romantic spirit, which Pater perceives as the harmony of strangeness and beauty. During Hopkins’ student days at Oxford, Pater’s relationship to the young poet was not confined to coaching only. Much of their time they spent in conversation, meditating upon the essential principles of artistic expression. Pater influenced Hopkins greatly and contributed impressively to the discipline of his poetic heart. Traces of this companionship do not find the path to Hopkins’ religious ruminations; they announce their own existence, although very subtly, upon the individual levels of Hopkins’ poetic yearnings.
    [Show full text]
  • The Pater Newsletter
    THE PATER NEWSLETTER A PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL WALTER PATER SOCIETY EDITOR Megan Becker-Leckrone, University of Nevada, Las Vegas EDITORIAL BOARD James Eli Adams, Cornell University Barrie Bullen, University of Reading Laurel Brake, Birkbeck College, University of London Lesley Higgins, York University Billie Andrew Inman, University of Arizona, Emerita Franco Marucci, Universita degli Studi di Venezia Catherine Maxwell, Qµeen Mary College, University of London Noriyuki Nozue, Osaka City University Robert Seiler, University of Calgary Paul Tucker, Universita degli Studi di Pisa Hayden Ward, West Virginia University, Emeritus BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Carolyn Williams, Rutgers UniYersity BIBLIOGRAPHER Kenneth Daley, Columbia College, C hicago ANNOTATORS Kit Andrews,Western Oregon University Kenneth Daley, Columbia College, Chicago Andrew Eastham, University of Leeds Meghan A. Freeman, Tulane University Noriyuki Nozue, Osaka City University EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE Megan Becker-Leckrone, Department of English, Box 455011, 4505 Maryland Parkway, UNLV, Las Vegas, NV 89154-5011 e-mail [email protected] tel 702 895 1244 fax 702 895 4801 IWPS OFFICERS President, Laurel Brake, Birkbeck College, University of London Vice-President, Lesley Higgins, York University INTERNATIONAL WALTER PATER SOCIETY CORRESPONDENCE Laurel Brake, Centre for Extramural Studies, Birkbeck College Russell Square, London, UK WClB SDQ e-mail [email protected] fax 44 207 631 6688 Lesley Higgins, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada e-mail [email protected] tel 416 736 2100, x22344 fax 416 736 5412 The Pater Newsletter (ISSN 0264-8342) is published twice yearly by the International Walter Pater Society. Items appearing in The Pater Newsletter may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the Editor, except in accordance with copyright laws and except for classroom use in colleges and universities.
    [Show full text]