eBook

Pater the classicist : classical scholarship, reception, and aestheticism

Evangelista, Stefano-Maria, Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Martindale, Charles

2017

Overview

This is the first book to address in detail Walter Pater’s important contribution to the study of classical antiquity. Pater is our greatest aesthetic critic. He was also a professional classicist who lectured and gave tutorials at the University of Oxford, and participated in many of the debates fostered by Classics as an academic discipline, a point often downplayed. Yet Pater’s aestheticism and his interests as a classicist went closely together. One might say that the classical tradition in its broadest sense (including the question of how to understand its workings and temporalities) is Pater’s principal subject as a writer. Pater initially approached antiquity obliquely (for example, through the Italian Renaissance or the poetry of William Morris). Later in his career he wrote more, and more directly, about the ancient world, particularly about his first love Greece. Pater’s conception of Classics was cross-disciplinary, outward-looking, and pan-European, and thus a potential model for Classics today. The Pater who emerges is a many-sided, inspirational figure, with a message for today, whose achievement helped to reinvigorate the classical studies that were the very basis of the English educational system of the nineteenth century. The four parts of the book discuss his classicism generally, his fiction set in classical antiquity (especially Marius the Epicurean), his writings on Greek literature and culture, and on ancient philosophy, especially the works of of Plato. The wider Victorian context is also illuminated, and other figures discussed include J. A. Symonds, Henry Nettleship, Vernon Lee, and Jane Harrison.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: Aestheticism (Literature) / Classical Literature / Classicists / Classicists -- Great Britain -- Biography / Pater, Walter, 1839-1894
• ISBN: 0198723415, 9780198723417