The Collected Works of Walter Pater Imaginary Portraits

Volume 3

Edited by Lene Ostermark-Johansen

Collected Works of Walter Pater

The Collected Works of Walter Pater preserves the integrity of Pater's revisions and arrangements of his writings, augments his uncollected essays and fiction, and brings together, for the first time, all of his literary journalism and academic studies, his extant correspondence, and transcriptions of his manuscripts
One of the first two volumes in the Collected Works; the other is Gaston De Latour, edited by Gerald Monsman
Textual variants reveal to the reader how and when Pater revised his text, and the patterns of his creative editorial decisions
Key background information is coherently, and thoroughly, presented; all phrases and quotations in French, German, Greek, and Latin are translated
Includes an overview of Pater's unique genre, its relation to the visual arts and to Victorian society, and the critical reception and influence of the Imaginary Portraits; a chronology of his life; a history of the book's publication; and a scholarly Appendix providing a historical context for the publication of Pater's last book, the Daniel Press edition of 'The Child in the House'
A thorough index guides readers interested in Pater's prose as it relates to art history, ancient history, Victorian culture, and literary theory

The Collected Works of Walter Pater Imaginary Portraits

Volume 3

Edited by Lene Ostermark-Johansen

Collected Works of Walter Pater

Description

Imaginary Portraits is Volume 3 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life.

Pater's Imaginary Portraits are among some of the most stylish and original pieces of short fiction in Victorian literature: portrayals of a series of handsome male protagonists across the ages of European history, set against a range of evocative European backdrops from Classical Greece to Medieval France, eighteenth-century Germany and modern England. Together, they constitute a remarkable testimony to Pater's profound understanding of centuries of cultural history, reworked in the hybrid genre of the imaginary portrait as sophisticated portrait miniatures of minor characters touched and affected by major moments in European history. They question central issues of nationhood and belonging, a Pan-European cultural identity, and the fate of the individual in the face of collective history. As formative texts for Modernist writers like Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, Pater's Imaginary Portraits had an impact which reached far beyond the nineteenth century.

The Collected Works of Walter Pater Imaginary Portraits

Volume 3

Edited by Lene Ostermark-Johansen

Collected Works of Walter Pater

General Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Critical Introduction
Textual Introduction
Biographical Register
IMAGINARY PORTRAITS
'A Prince of Court Painters: Extracts from an Old French Journal'
'Denys l'Auxerrois'
'Sebastian van Storck'
'Duke Carl of Rosenmold'
An Imaginary Poet: The Child in the House
'Imaginary Portraits 2: An English Poet'
'Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides'
'Emerald Uthwart'
'Apollo in Picardy'
Notes and Endmatter
Textual Variants
Explanatory Notes
Appendix: The Daniel Press Edition of 'The Child in the House' (1894)
Bibliography
Index

The Collected Works of Walter Pater Imaginary Portraits

Volume 3

Edited by Lene Ostermark-Johansen

Collected Works of Walter Pater

Author Information

Lene Ostermark-Johansen, University of Copenhagen

Lene Ostermark-Johansen teaches English art and literature at the University of Copenhagen and is a Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She has a long-standing interest in word-image relations and has published extensively on Walter Pater and a range of other late nineteenth-century writers. Ostermark-Johansen is the author of Sweetness and Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late Victorian England (1998) and of Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (2011). She is currently working on a monograph on Pater and portraiture.

The Collected Works of Walter Pater Imaginary Portraits

Volume 3

Edited by Lene Ostermark-Johansen

Collected Works of Walter Pater

Reviews and Awards

"In 2019, Pater specialists and enthusiasts welcomed Imaginary Portraits...[Lene Østermark-Johansen] amasses numerous examples of the expression 'imaginary portrait' as used in English literature and culture since the end of the eighteenth century and through the Romantic and Victorian ages." -- Elisa Bizzotto, Iuav University of Venice, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism