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.

Haunted by ‘Lenore’: The Fragment as Gothic Form, Creative Practice and Textual Evolution

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
Kirstin A. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Creative Practice ◽  
Critical Gap ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

This article examines the processes of fragmentation and haunting surrounding the explosion of competing translations, in 1796, of Gottfried August Bürger's German ballad ‘Lenore’. While the fragment has become known as a core narrative device of the Gothic, less attention has been paid to the ways that the fragment and fragmentation operate as dynamic, living phenomena within the Gothic's central processes of memory, inspiration, creation, dissemination and evolution. Taking ‘Lenore’ as a case study, this essay aims to redress this critical gap by illuminating the ways that fragmentation haunts the mind, the text, and the history of the Gothic as a process as much as a product. It demonstrates that fragmentation operates along lines of cannibalism, resurrection and haunting to establish a pattern of influence that paves the way for modern forms of gothic intertextuality and adaptation. Importantly, it thereby locates fragmentation as a process at the heart of the Gothic mode.

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.

Knowledge, confidence, skills and practices among midwives in the republic of Ireland in relation to perinatal mental health care: The mind mothers study

Midwifery ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 29-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Carroll ◽  
Carmel Downes ◽  
Ailish Gill ◽  
Mark Monahan ◽  
Ursula Nagle ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Mental Health Care ◽  
Perinatal Mental Health ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Mind

Anamnesis: Platonic Doctrine or Sophistic Absurdity?

Dialogue ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 604-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Cobb
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
Basic Point ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind

There are two basic ways in which the phenomenon of learning is explicated in the Platonic dialogues: First, by means of an analogy with vision, and second, by arguing that the acquisition of knowledge is really anamnesis (recollection). The analogy with vision is the more common of the two and occurs throughout the dialogues. The passage in the Republic comparing the sun and the good (508c-509b) is the best known instance of this approach to the clarification of learning. The basic point of this explication is that the mind, like the eye, in order to discover truth must be turned in the right direction and be trained to apprehend and distinguish the characters of the objects it beholds. In this context, the acquisition of knowledge is clearly a discovery of that which was not previously known, just as the man who escapes from the cave sees what he had not previously seen (Republic, 514a-516c), and at the end of the ascent of the heavenly ladder one “begins to see” what he has not seen before (Symposium, 211b 8).

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.

Villette and the Life of the Mind

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 410-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Arthur Hugh Clough ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

Missbronte has written a hideous, undelightful, convulsed, constricted novel … one of the most utterly disagreeable books I ever read,“ wrote Matthew Arnold to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, shortly after the first publication of Villette. The novel struck Arnold mainly as a case of morbid religiosity. Only a month later another critic, George Henry Lewes, writing more from the point of view of the amateur psychologist, said of the very same novel: ”It is a work of astonishing power and passion. From its pages there issues an influence of truth as healthful as a mountain breeze.“ These are typical of the antithetical responses that Villette has always evoked.

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