Walter Pater's European Imagination

This is the first monograph that explores the work and legacy of Walter Pater from a European perspective. It offers an in-depth analysis of Pater's fictional 'imaginary portraits' which trace the development of the European self over an extensive period of some two thousand years.

Lene Østermark-Johansen is Professor of English literature at the University of Copenhagen. Since her first book, Sweetness and Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late Victorian England (1998), she has specialised in word-image relations and published a broad range of essays and articles on Victorian aesthetes: A. C. Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Arthur Symons and, most substantially, Walter Pater. Her second monograph Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (2011) was followed by her critical edition of Pater's Imaginary Portraits (2019). She is currently co-editing a volume on Pater's contribution to the establishing of English as an academic subject.

- Introduction - 1: Type and Individual - 2: Life-Writing - 3: Narrating the Self - 4: Character and Caricature - 5: The Poetics of Space: From Rooms to Cathedrals - 6: The Poetics of Place: Mapping Pater's Europe - 7: The Poetics of Time: Pater and History - Bibliography