Table Of ContentTesting New Opinions and Courting
New Impressions
Reflecting Walter Pater’s diverse engagements with literature, the visual
arts, history, and philosophy, this collection of essays explores new inter-
disciplinary perspectives engaging readers and scholars alike to revisit
methodologies, intertextualities, metaphysical positions, and stylistic fea-
tures 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.
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).
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,
art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social,
technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians
and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and
cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities;
and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals,
commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology,
gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, social-
ism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address
continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work
on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic
novels, and film will also be considered.
1 Arthur O’Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British
Museum
By Jordan Kistler
2 Dialectics of Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction
By Leila May
3 Louise Jopling
By Patricia de Montfort
Testing New Opinions and
Courting New Impressions
New Perspectives on Walter Pater
Edited by Anne-Florence Gillard-
Estrada, Martine Lambert-Charbonnier,
and Charlotte Ribeyrol
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, Martine Lambert-
Charbonnier, and Charlotte Ribeyrol to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN: 978-1-138-08157-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10352-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon LT Std
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Tables viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction 1
BÉNÉDICTE COSTE, ANNE-FLORENCE GILLARD-ESTRADA, MARTINE
LAMBERT-CHARBONNIER, AND CHARLOTTE RIBEYROL
PART I
Pater’s Modern Involvement: New Editorial and
Biographical Approaches 13
1 Walter Pater and the New Media: The “Child” in the House 15
LAUREL BRAKE
2 Privileging the Later Pater: The Choice of Copy-Text
for the Collected Works 37
LESLEY HIGGINS AND DAVID LATHAM
3 Habitus and the Multifaceted Self: Are There Different Paters? 51
MARTINE LAMBERT-CHARBONNIER
PART II
Intertextualities: The Aesthete and Contemporary Culture 67
4 Trace, Race and Grace: The Influence of Ernest Renan’s
Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse on Pater’s Gaston
de Latour 69
ADAM LEE
vi Contents
5 The Loveliness of Things and the Sorrow of the World:
Art and Ethics in Pater and George Eliot 89
THOMAS ALBRECHT
6 A Great Chain of Curiosity: Pater’s “Sir Thomas Browne”
and its Nineteenth-Century British Context 109
DAICHI ISHIKAWA
PART III
Modern Interactions: Aestheticism, Desire, and
Artistic Detachment 125
7 “What an interesting period . . . is this we are in!”:
Walter Pater and the Synchronization of the “Æsthetic Life” 127
JOSEPH BRISTOW
8 Walter Pater’s Dialectical History of (Same-Sex)
Desire: Queer Conclusions 148
MICHAEL F. DAVIS
9 “Unimpassioned Passion”: Inner Excess and Exterior
Restraint in Pater’s Rhetoric of Affect 166
NICHOLAS MANNING
PART IV
Interart Poetics: The Art of the Portrait 179
10 “What came of him?”: Change and Continuity in
Pater’s Portraits 181
LENE ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN
11 Walter Pater’s Lives of Philosophers: Inversions of
the Aesthetic Life in “Coleridge’s Writings” and
“Sebastian van Storck” 200
KIT ANDREWS
12 Reading the Mona Lisa 218
PASCAL AQUIEN
Index 228
Figures
10.1 Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), Le liseur
blanc (The White Reader) (1857), oil on panel,
21.7 cm × 15.7 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay 183
10.2 Jean-Baptiste Pater (1695–1736), Portrait de Marie-
Marguerite Pater, oil on canvas, 79.2 cm × 62.9 cm.
Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts 187
10.3 Philip de Koninck, Panoramic River Landscape (1664),
oil on canvas, 95 cm × 121 cm. Museum Boijmans van
Beuningen, Rotterdam 190
10.4 Wilhelm von Gloeden, Bacchus (1890s) photograph 194
10.5 Dresden figurine (mid eighteenth century), porcelain,
25 cm, private collection 196
12.1 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503–1506), oil,
77 cm × 53 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre 219
Tables
1.1 Monthly magazines. New generations 1859–1890.
1 shilling; 6d 18
1.2 New (fourth) generation of reviews 1865–1898 19
1.3 Patterns of publication 1: serials to which Walter
Pater contributed 20
1.4 Patterns of publication 2: numbers of contributions
per serial title 21
1.5 Patterns of publication 3: Pater’s serial publications
by genre 22
1.6 Patterns of publication 4: contributions to periodicals,
by decades of entry 23
1.7 Patterns of publication 5: Pater’s use of anonymity
and signature 24
1.8 Patterns of publication 6: Pater in American
“eclectics,” 1876–1892 25
1.9 Patterns of publication 7: aggregations of Pater’s
journalism, excluding collected editions 25
1.10 Pater’s Uncollected Essays (Mosher, 1903):
contents by category 27
1.11 Walter H. Pater and Macmillan and Co. 32
Contributors
Thomas Albrecht teaches literature and literary criticism as an Associate
Professor in the Department of English at Tulane University in New
Orleans. He is the author of The Medusa Effect: Representation and
Epistemology in Victorian Aesthetics (State University of New York
Press, 2009) and the editor of Selected Writings by Sarah Kofman
(Stanford University Press, 2007). He is currently completing a book
manuscript on ethics in the writings of George Eliot.
Kit Andrews is Professor of English at Western Oregon University. He
has published articles on Walter Pater, Michael Field, Watteau, and
T.H. Green in journals such as ELT and The Journal of the History
of Ideas. His article on Carlyle’s reception of Fichte recently appeared
in Literature Compass. He is currently researching Benjamin Jowett’s
critique of the Victorian reception of Hegel by Oxford Idealist
philosophers.
Pascal Aquien is Professor of English Literature (Poetry) at Paris-Sorbonne
University. His major publications include W.H. Auden: de l’Éden
perdu au jardin des mots (L’Harmattan, 1996); The Picture of Dorian
Gray. Pour une poétique du roman (Éditions du Temps, 2004); Oscar
Wilde. Les mots et les songes (Aden, 2006); Tombeau pour Swinburne.
Chapter: “Lesbia Brandon, ou l’art et la lanière” (Aden, 2010); numer-
ous editions and translations of Oscar Wilde’s comedies and major
works (Flammarion and Le Livre de Poche). He has contributed to the
edition of Oscar Wilde’s works (Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
1996) and edited Thomas De Quincey’s works (Œuvres, Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 2011). He is author of numerous articles on
English poetry (19th and 20th centuries). His research interests include
stylistic analysis of poetry and literary corpus.
Laurel Brake is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at
Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are media his-
tory, gender, digital humanities, and Walter and Clara Pater. She is the
