The first collected study of Pater's significance to criticism, revealing his pivotal role in establishing principles of the literary essay.

Within this text, first published in German in 1960, the influential German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser writes engagingly of Pater's aesthetic.

Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture is the first monograph to discuss the Victorian critic Walter Pater's attitude to sculpture. Bringing together Pater's aesthetic theories with his theories on language and writing, it demonstrates how his ideas of the visual and written language are closely interlinked. This study throws new light on the extraordinary complexity and coherence of Pater's writing, and repositions him solidly within Victorian art and literature.

Harold Bloom's selection of Pater's writings brings together in one volume the most important sections and passages from The Renaissance, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, Plato and Platonism, Greek Studies, and Sketches and Reviews, as well as "The Child in the House." Pater, the chief aesthetician and literary critic of Victorian England, brought his powerful imagination to bear on a wide range of subjects: from the drama of Euripides to the painters of the Renaissance, from the Romantic poets to the pre-Raphaelites, from Plato to Oscar Wilde. In the twentieth century, Pater's theories of art and literature exerted a strong inluence on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stevens.

Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging moder