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Classical Studies is Volume 8 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 carried this spirit into his studies of Greek mythology and sculpture in the 1870s and 1880s--among the most important encounters of any Victorian writer with the classical tradition. Pater's classical studies offer revisionary accounts of the myths of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and undertake original interpretations of the history of Greek sculpture and tragedy. Deeply informed by, but never beholden to, the verities of classical scholarship, Pater approaches Greek myth and art from the perspective of what he famously called 'aesthetic criticism': with an eye to their beauty and the ways they speak to modern life. Pater's interpretations of classical culture cut against the grain of the high Victorian appreciation of ancient Greece, which imagined a placid world of reason and pure white beauty. Like his contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, Pater is by contrast attentive to the dark side of antiquity, highlighting its depths of emotion, its dissident sexuality, its gaudy colours, and its transgressive challenges to the ruling order. These essays were highly influential among Pater's younger contemporaries, and would later inform works like James Joyce's Ulysses, which likewise traces links between ancient Greece and modern life.
List of contents
- Critical Introduction
- Textual Introduction
- The Myth of Demeter and Persephone
- A Study of Dionysus
- The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture / I. The Heroic Age of Greek Art / II. The Age of Graven Images
- The Marbles of Aegina
- The Bacchanals of Euripides
- The Age of Athletic Prizemen
- Textual Variants
- Explanatory Notes
- Appendix A: Ancient Sources in Classical Studies
- Appendix B: Shadwell's 'Preface' to Greek Studies (1895)
About the author
Matthew Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the fin de siècle in Britain and France and is the author of Mimesis (2006), The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (2013), and The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (2019), and is co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1998).
Summary
Classical Studies is the eighth volume in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. This volume presents Pater's classical studies, which offer revisionary accounts of Greek myths and undertake original interpretations of the history of Greek sculpture and tragedy.
Additional text
Careful readers of Pater will owe a debt of gratitude to Potolsky for garnering much useful material.
Report
Careful readers of Pater will owe a debt of gratitude to Potolsky for garnering much useful material. Charles Martindale and Elizabeth Prettejohn, University of Bristol and University of York, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism
