Expression and Sympathy in Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Kenneth Burke

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-29
Author(s):  
William Schraufnagel
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Walter Pater

The Decadent Imagination

2018 ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
George Moore

This chapter examines how aesthetes and decadents staked a competing claim to those Roman narratives of corruption and contagion outlined in Chapter 7. Beginning with a detailed analysis of Marius the Epicurean (1885), it shows how Walter Pater and his contemporaries sought to delink aestheticism from Gibbonian narratives of decline and fall, and to reclaim aesthetic masculinity from associations of moral and masculine deviance. The second part examines decadent authors such as Oscar Wilde, Villiers de L’Isle Adam, and George Moore, who adopted an equally recuperative, though more controversial approach to the ancient Roman past. Revelling in the more illicit and disturbing aspects of Roman history with a playfully self-parodic humour which is typical of the movement as a whole, and frequently voicing their affinity with the most notorious of Roman emperors—Nero—decadent writers appear be invested in a very genuine attempt to disassociate decadent ideologies from Gibbonian models of degeneration and decline.

Decadence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaël Ingelbien
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Art For Art's Sake

Decadence was a word used to refer, often disparagingly, to late-19th-century European writers and artists whose credo of ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ (Dictionary of Art Historians) went hand in hand with an open disdain for morality and for the values of their own societies. Often associated with modern French literature and its influence, decadent tendencies were observed in many different countries. In England, its main representatives were Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and various figures who were inspired by French examples and by the aestheticism of Walter Pater (1839–1894). Its main features were a cult of beauty, refinement and artificiality; a fascination for the paradoxical, the bizarre, the exotic and the perverse; and an iconoclastic attitude towards dominant values. While manifestations of decadence did earn a place in fin-de-siècle London culture, the phenomenon did not survive the spectacular fall of Oscar Wilde in 1895, but some of its ideas and attitudes point forward to modernism.

Art and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

Parodies of the Pre-Raphaelite Ballad Refrain

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Gradual Increase ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Narrative Progression

Carolyn Williams, “Parodies of the Pre-Raphaelite Ballad Refrain” (pp. 227–255) Parodies of literary ballads changed over the course of the nineteenth century, as did their implicit commentaries on practices of poetic revival in general. In the 1870s and 1880s a focused reaction against the Pre-Raphaelite ballad refrain has much to show us about the function of the refrain, which operates as a timing device yet also guides a gradual increase in the ballad’s incrementally modulated sense of pain, making meaning by turning away from narrative progression and meaning-making. Debates about the poetics of revival, a subject across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, culminate in the great theorizations of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, who both comment on the ballad refrain. The dynamics of literary history may also be illuminated by this attention to parodies of the ballad refrain, for the role of the refrain within any given ballad may be seen as homologous to the role of parody within literary history—simultaneously interrupting, turning away, and binding a sense of continuity. This essay glances at the ballads of “Bon Gaultier” (1845) and demonstrates the general parodic interest in—and defenses of—the Pre-Raphaelite ballad refrain later in the century, before attending to parodies of D. G. Rossetti’s “Sister Helen” (1870, 1881) by Robert Buchanan in 1871 and Henry Duff Traill in 1882.

Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Riddell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, essayist, author and poet, and one of Victorian England’s chief proponents of Aestheticism. His works are often characterised by the use of humorous paradox, which questions Victorian certainties of truth, value and morality. Wilde is best known today for his play The Importance of Being Earnest (1894), his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) and his imprisonment in 1895 on grounds of ‘gross indecency’ after a series of scandalous trials. Individualism is central to Wilde’s philosophy, and many of his works challenge or ironise social conventions that seek to limit autonomy of personal expression. Wilde prefigures the concerns of much twentieth-century Modernist literature in his critique of Realism, his scepticism regarding authentic selfhood and his often absurd dramatic mode. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854, the son of upper-middle class Anglo-Irish intellectuals. His earliest education was at the staunchly Protestant Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, before he progressed to Trinity College, Dublin in 1871. Wilde excelled as a student of Greek, and in 1874 was awarded a scholarship to read Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. Here he was influenced by aesthetic theorists Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Having graduated with a double first, Wilde settled in London in 1879, where he soon set about cultivating an image as an aesthete and dandy.

PATER'S MOUTH

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Matthew Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Falling In Love

At New College, Oxford, Lionel Johnsonhad a reputation for sleeping past noon. On Monday, April 15, 1889, the sun was high overhead when he boasted in a letter to his friend Campbell Dodgson of his intimacy with the elusive Walter Pater, at whose London house he had spent the weekend: “I lunched with Pater, dined with Pater, smoked with Pater, went to Mass with Pater and fell in love with Pater” (Roseliep 148). That all of these friendly activities – lunching, dining, smoking, taking Communion, and perhaps even falling in love – entail opening one's mouth, or at least loosening one's lips, suggests a connection, in Johnson's eyes, between Pater's well-documented powers to charm his audience and the oral susceptibility of that audience. Getting to know thetruePater, Johnson implies, is an oral affair. His conversations with Pater, their meals, his very sense of Pater, linger on his lips. Teachers open our eyes. But Pater opens Johnson's mouth. One is tempted to dismiss the letter to Dodgson, who, like Johnson, was same-sex oriented, as youthful homoerotic banter: a campy projection of Johnson's own ambivalent and mercurial appetites. A year later, after all, in a letter to his friend Arthur Galton, Johnson recounts a “mid-day” visit he received at Oxford – whilst “lying half asleep in bed” – from Oscar Wilde, who “laughed at Pater” and “consumed all my cigarettes” (Holland and Hart-Davis 423). “I am in love with him,” Johnson declares.

Aestheticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaël Ingelbien
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Theophile Gautier ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
European Thought ◽  
Lasting Influence

Aestheticism refers to a late-Victorian tendency to argue that art is its own justification and should therefore be judged by purely aesthetic criteria. Closely related to the doctrine of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) put forward by Théophile Gautier and to the radical aesthetic theories of Charles Baudelaire, British aestheticism found its leading exponent in Walter Pater. His work had an immediate and profound impact on writers and artists like Oscar Wilde, who are sometimes referred to as aesthetes, and more often as decadents, and his lasting influence has been traced in the work of several major modernist writers. As a category of English literary history, the term "aestheticism" is a relatively recent scholarly construction. However, contemporaries used words like "aesthetes" and "aesthetic" to designate the late-Victorian phenomenon. The Greek word α ἰ σθητικός refers to "that which is perceptible by the senses;" in modern European thought, aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that analyses the ways in which artworks produce sensations in spectators and, more broadly, the nature and role of art.

The Platonism of Walter Pater

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lee
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Platonic Love ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Mind

This book examines Walter Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism throughout his career, as a teacher of Plato in Oxford’s Literae Humaniores, from his earliest known essay, ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Pater is influenced by several of Plato’s dialogues, including Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Cratylus, and The Republic, which inform his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style. As a philosopher, critic, and artist, Plato embodies what it means to be an author to Pater, who imitates his creative practice from vision to expression. Through the recognition of form in matter, Pater views education as a journey to refine one’s knowledge of beauty in order to transform oneself. Platonism is a point of contact with his contemporaries, including Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, offering a means to take new measure of their literary relationships. The philosophy also provides boundaries for critical encounters with figures across history, including Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism seeks the mind of the author as an affinity, so that his writing enacts Platonic love.

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