Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment (European Studies in English Literature) - Softcover

Iser, Wolfgang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521179289 ISBN 13: 9780521179287

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Wolfgang Iser's study of Walter Pater (1839-94) was first published in German in 1960. It places the English critic, essayist and novelist in a philosophical tradition whose major exponents were Hegel and Coleridge, at the same time showing how Pater differed crucially from these thinkers to become representative of a late Victorian culture critically poised in transition between Romanticism and Modernism. Pater's new definitions of 'beauty' and 'style' in art, his doctrine of 'art for art's sake', his preoccupation with aesthetic existence, his fascination with periods of balance and historical transition are seen in the light of his scepticism towards all systematisation and his view of art as countering human finiteness by capturing the intensity of the moment. This important book, which remains as illuminating now as when it first appeared, will interest those interested in philosophy and aesthetics and Pater specialists alike.

About this title

Book Description:

The influential German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser engagingly writes of Pater's aesthetic. The book is fluent and fascinating, and will be of interest to scholars of Pater, admirers of Iser and those with a wider interest in the beginnings of the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement and the cult of beauty.

Language Notes:

Text: English, German (translation)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0521179289
• ISBN 13: 9780521179287
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 226