The English author Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) was the most influential figure in the Esthetic movement of the late 19th century. His writings reveal a mind of sensibility and discrimination, embodying its judgments in carefully wrought prose. By...

Walter Pater is important to English literary history because he combines a commitment to the romantic theory that art is essentially an expression of personality with a sympathetic response to the scientific and historical studies of the Victorian...

Walter Pater called the short fictions he published between 1878 and 1893 "imaginary portraits." They are a distinctive blend of history, myth, and autobiography, the outgrowth of his study and writing in the 1860s and 1870s on the Italian and French...

Pater, Walter Horatio(1839 bingen: Niemeyer,...

Walter Horatio Pater (August 4 1839 - July 30 1894) was an English essayist and art and literary...

The American Classics: A Personal Essay, by Denis Donoghue. Yale University Press, 295 pages, $27.Rapping the knuckles of the American classics is good fun-especially if it's done with a light, sharp touch. And nobody gets hurt, certainly not the great dead white males themselves, who...

In the following excerpt, Buckler traces Pater's aesthetic development as evidenced in his works.

In the following excerpt, Williams examines the infamous “Conclusion” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance and explains what Pater meant in proposing aesthetic distance as an alternative to prevailing modern thought.

In the following essay, originally published in 1976, Miller examines Pater's thoughts on such topics as time, virtue, personality, uniqueness, repetition, form, meaning, and subjectivity; he also contends that the various and contradictory readings of his positions are irreconcilable.