Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism

by Carolyn Williams

Overview

Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater’s prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater’s aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater’s aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501707117
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Carolyn Williams is Chair and Professor of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is the author most recently of Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody.

Table of Contents

Part One: Opening Conclusions

1. "That Which Is Without"

2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling"

3. Aestheticism

4. Answerable Style

5. Historicism

6. Aesthetic Historicism and "Aesthetic Poverty"

7. The Poetics of Revival

Part Two: Figural Strategies in The Renaissance

1. Legend and Historicity

2. Myths of History: The Last Supper

3. The Historicity of Myth

4. Myths of History: The Mona Lisa

5. Types and Figures

6. Low and High Relief: "Luca Della Robbia"

7. The Senses of Relief

Part Three: Historical Novelty and Marius the Epicurean

1. The Transparent Hero

2. Autobiography of the Zeitgeist

3. The Transcendental Induction

4. Typology as Narrative Form

5. Typological Ladders

6. Christian Historicism

7. Literary History as "Appreciation"

Part Four: "Recovery as Reminiscence": The Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism

1. Histories of Myth: The Greek Studies

2. The House Beautiful and Its Interpreter

3. The Philosophy of Mythic Form

4. The History of Philosophy

5. The Anecdote of the Shell

6. Dialogue and Dialectic

7. Paterian Recollection: The Anagogic Mind

Editorial Reviews

A convincing account of the unity of Pater's thought and probably the most detailed treatment ever attempted of the intricacies of his prose; a book that is likely to be an essential source for future readings of Pater.

Nineteenth-Century Literature

In addition to her superb analysis of the style and thought of Pater's individual writing, demonstrates that Pater was far more philosophically coherent and complex, and of far more interest for contemporary critical thought, than has previously been recognized. Her book is the best critical study on Pater yet written.

Victorian Studies

A convincing account of the unity of Pater's thought and probably the most detailed treatment ever attempted of the intricacies of his prose; a book that is likely to be an essential source for future readings of Pater.

-- "Nineteenth-Century Literature"

In addition to her superb analysis of the style and thought of Pater's individual writing, demonstrates that Pater was far more philosophically coherent and complex, and of far more interest for contemporary critical thought, than has previously been recognized. Her book is the best critical study on Pater yet written.

-- "Victorian Studies"

From the Publisher