Book contents
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Pater and English Literature
- Part I General
- Introduction to Part I
- Chapter 1 ‘Of the true family of Montaigne’: Appreciations and the Essay Tradition in English Literature
- Chapter 2 Unravelling Pater’s English Poet: The Imaginary Portrait as Criticism
- Chapter 3 Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader
- Chapter 4 Studies in European Literature: Pater’s Cosmopolitan Criticism
- Chapter 5 The ‘Postscript’
- Chapter 6 Form, Matter, and Metaphysics in Walter Pater’s Essay on ‘Style’
- Chapter 7 Walter Pater, Second-Hand Stylist
- Part II Individual Authors: Early Moderns, Romantics, Contemporaries
- Postscript
- Walter Pater and English Studies: A Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Chapter 1 - ‘Of the true family of Montaigne’: Appreciations and the Essay Tradition in English Literature
from Part I - General
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2023
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Pater and English Literature
- Part I General
- Introduction to Part I
- Chapter 1 ‘Of the true family of Montaigne’: Appreciations and the Essay Tradition in English Literature
- Chapter 2 Unravelling Pater’s English Poet: The Imaginary Portrait as Criticism
- Chapter 3 Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader
- Chapter 4 Studies in European Literature: Pater’s Cosmopolitan Criticism
- Chapter 5 The ‘Postscript’
- Chapter 6 Form, Matter, and Metaphysics in Walter Pater’s Essay on ‘Style’
- Chapter 7 Walter Pater, Second-Hand Stylist
- Part II Individual Authors: Early Moderns, Romantics, Contemporaries
- Postscript
- Walter Pater and English Studies: A Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Appreciations represents a significant contribution to nineteenth-century literary historiography and to the delineation of the English essay tradition. Pater’s book asserts the centrality of Romanticism and develops a historical schema for the essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing narrative, prominently articulated by Arnold, of eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the achievement in that mode, an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism. Pater sets a modern tradition of prose derived from Montaigne and inaugurated by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy epitomises the romantic impulse of English literature. Pater’s treatment of the literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critics such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, associated with the rise of English Studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.
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- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies , pp. 39 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023