Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1967. Monsman undertakes a comprehensive critical analysis of Walter Pater's fiction, which presents the critic with numerous causes of frustration, not the least of which is a lack of both dramatic narration and description. Pater is rarely vivid and firsthand in his fiction; he tends instead toward exposition. Monsman's emphasis in Pater's Portraits is tracing out the conscious artistic structure of Pater's fiction. The scope of Pater's writings comprises nothing less than Western culture itself; its subject is all that man has written, thought, said, sung, hoped, or prayed as a civilized creature over two and one-half millennia. Pater's success in handling such panoply is attributable to his discovery of a coherent pattern by which art, religion, and life can be organized. Monsman aims to discover in Pater's fiction the use of old scientific-religious patterns of myth to explain moments of religious and cultural awakening, to reveal the way in which one man a
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
I. Art and the Gods of Art
II. Portraiture and the Early Portraits
III. Marius the Epicurean (1885)
IV. The Collected Imaginary Portraits
V. Gaston de Latour (1888) and Religious Belief
VI. The Uncollected Imaginary Portraits
VII. Myth and Metaphor
Index
