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This book examines Pater's deep engagement with Platonism throughout this career. Using the interdisciplinary critical tools of Pater's own educational milieu which combined literature, philosophy, and classics,
The Platonism of Walter Pater repositions the importance Pater's contribution to literature and the history of ideas.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Strange Beauty
- 2: The Ethics of Contemplation in 'Wordsworth'
- 3: From Myth to Logos in Greek Studies
- 4: Paideia, or Platonic Education, in Marius the Epicurean
- 5: Platonic Communion and 'An Unfinished Romance' in Gaston de Latour
- 6: The Revelation in Plato and Platonism and the Authority of Affinity
- The Book
- The Authority of Affinity
- Conclusion
About the author
Adam Lee is an Assistant Professor at Tyndale University, Canada. He has a D.Phil in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, specializing in the late-Victorian era. He has taught a range of courses at Sheridan College, including Composition and Rhetoric, Greek Mythology, and Canadian Literature; and currently he teaches literature from Classics to contemporary at Tyndale University, in Toronto, Canada.
Summary
This book examines Pater's deep engagement with Platonism throughout this career. Using the interdisciplinary critical tools of Pater's own educational milieu which combined literature, philosophy, and classics, The Platonism of Walter Pater repositions the importance Pater's contribution to literature and the history of ideas.
Additional text
Throughout his engaging discussion of Pater's highly 'personal' Platonism, Lee offers a 'new portrait of Pater' (p. 251), depicting the growth of a complex mind whose Platonic affinities shed new light on the 'curiosity and desire of beauty' (Pater, Renaissance, qtd on p. 41) which Aestheticism so strongly projected onto the Hellenic past.
