Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

The first collected study of Pater's significance to criticism, revealing his pivotal role in establishing principles of the literary essay.

This first collected discussion of Pater's significance for English literary criticism reveals his importance in shaping the principles of Modernist criticism and comprehensively contextualises his work. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.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.