Adam Lee, The Platonism of Walter Pater: Embodied Equity

• According to Edmund Gosse, Walter Pater protested misrepresentations of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), commenting: ‘I wish they wouldn’t call me “a hedonist”; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek.’1 This focus on the classical heritage was characteristic: remembered today for his leading role in the aestheticism movement and as a novelist and art critic, Pater was, by profession, fellow of Brasenose, lecturing throughout his career on classical philosophy, literature, and art. Whereas earlier critics such as Richard Jenkyns dismissed Pater’s quality as a classical scholar, the topic has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years, most notably with Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista, and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Pater the Classicist (2017). Adam Lee’s monograph sides with these recent reassessments, making the case that Plato’s philosophy was central to everything that Pater wrote and thought.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Filosofi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- Philosophy (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Literature

litteraturvetenskap

filosofi

Philosophy

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

rec (subject category)