The following work deals with the idea of Beauty as seen in the work of Winckelmann and its influence on Walter Pater, the English critic. The concept of Beauty is to be analyzed chronologically. First of all, the concept of Beauty in Winckelmann’s work will be analysed and its particularities will be described. Further, the concept of Beauty will be analyzed in so far as it changes throughout time and influences the further development of aesthetic theory. Hegel takes up Winckelmann’s idea of Beauty and uses this idea in his own aesthetic theory. Walter Pater takes up and develops the idea of Beauty not only from Winckelmann, but also from Hegel. The influence of both art critics, Winckelmann and Hegel, on Walter Pater will be shown in this thesis. The latter, as this thesis shows, was to develop his own aesthetic theory, which is supported by the concept of Beauty in Winckelmann and Hegel.

In Walter Pater’s work there are often mentions of discipline and ascesis in an explicitly positive way. But, in some of his work, discipline, although not ascesis, seem to be taking on a more negative form. Critics have nonetheless seemed satisfied with Pater’s explicit praise for discipline and the area is thus not very thoroughly researched. One area that is well researched is the homoerotic subtexts that are evident in a lot of Pater’s work, which critics have examined in a variety of different ways. I suggest analysing the imaginary portraits “Emerald Uthwart” and “Apollo in Picardy,” to argue that Pater contrasts the Ancient Greek notion of ascesis with the nineteenth century understanding of discipline in order to question the legal restrictions on homosexuality in late nineteenth century England. Due to the historical context of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which criminalised homosexuality, and Pater’s regular use of—as well as his admiration for—Ancient Greece, I have found that there is a connection between discipline, ascesis, and homosexuality. In the essay I make use of some of Foucault’s theories, especially from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 and Vol. 2., to argue that the juxtaposition between homosexuality and discipline and ascesis in the two portraits provides new insights to the intricacies of Pater’s work. Keywords: Walter Pater; discipline; ascesis; homosexuality; “Apollo in Picardy”; “Emerald Uthwart”; Imaginary Portraits

"Of That Transfigured World" identifies a generally unremarked upon mode of nineteenth-century literature that intermingles realism and fantasy in order to address epistemological problems. I contend that works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde maintain a realist core overlaid by fantastic elements that come from the language used to characterize the core narrative or from metatexts or paratexts (such as stories that characters tell). The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with the problems of representation and the ability of literature to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, each of these authors relies on the fantastic in order to reach the kinds of meaning nineteenth-century realism strives for. My critical framework is derived from the two interrelated discourses of sacred space theology and cultural geography, focusing primarily on the terms topos and chora which I figure as parallel to realism and fantasy. These terms, gleaned from Aristotle and Plato, function to express two interweaving concepts of space that together construct our sense of place. Topos, as defined by Belden C. Lane, refers to "a mere location, a measurable, quantifiable point, neutral and indifferent" whereas chora refers to place as "an energizing force, suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our lives." In the narratives I examine, meaning is constructed via the fantastic interpretations (chora) of realistically portrayed events (topos). The writers I engage with use this dynamic to strategically address pressing epistemological concerns relating to the purpose of art and its relationship to truth. My dissertation examines the works of Dickens, the Brontës, Pater, and Wilde through the lens of this conceptual framework, focusing on how the language that each of these writers uses overlays chora on top of topos. In essence each of these writers uses imaginative language to transfigure the worlds they describe for specific purposes. For Dickens these fantastic hermeneutics allow him to transfigure world into one where the "familiar" becomes "romantic," where moral connections are clear, and which encourages the moral imagination necessary for empathy to take root. Charlotte and Emily Brontës's transfigurations highlight the subjectivity inherent in representation. For Pater, that transfigured world is aesthetic experience and the way our understanding of the "actual world" of topos is shaped by it. Oscar Wilde's transfigured world is by far the most radical, for in the end that transfigured world ceases to be artificial, as Wilde disrupts the separation between reality and artifice. "Of That Transfigured World" argues for a closer understanding of the hermeneutic and epistemological workings of several major British authors. My dissertation offers a paradigm through which to view these writers that connects them to the on-going Victorian discourses of realism while also pointing to the critical sophistication of their positions in seeking to relate truth to art. My identification of the tensions between what I term topos and chora in these works illuminates the relationship between the creation of meaning and the hermeneutics used to direct the reader to that particular meaning. It further points to the important, yet sometimes troubling, role that imagination plays in the epistemologies at the center of that crowning Victorian achievement, the Realist novel.

Senses of Freedom explores Walter Pater’s provocative claim that poetry’s defining importance would be to “rearrange the details of modern life” in order to restore the “sense of freedom” lost to modern consciousness. Freedom, variously defined and contested, has long been a central concern to philosophical aesthetics, but few have made its problematics central to an applied criticism. The critical practice I explore asks how form, in a given instance, provides a “sense of freedom” by addressing anxieties of causal determinism, and foregrounding the cultural and linguistic materiality of a subjective perspective. After an introduction outlining and contextualizing a formalist aesthetic criticism drawn from Pater’s work, the dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I surveys aestheticism’s determinist vision (Chapter I) and defines the complex term personality (Chapter II) across Pater’s oeuvre. Aestheticism’s determinism anchors the authorial personality to a network of historically contingent cultural and linguistic determinants; while the personality in turn gives an epistemologically accessible human form to these defining “forces.” Part II exemplifies aesthetic criticism in stand-alone essays on the poetry of three modern authors: Charlotte Mew, Samuel Beckett, and W. H. Auden. In Mew’s work I examine the structure of confinement and passionate renunciation in the form of the hushed tone broken by the “cri de coeur.” In Beckett, I consider the gnomic mode as resolving the problematized space, the “no-man’s land,” between objective and subjective artistic positions. In Auden, I explore how the “gratuitous” and “gratitude” align in his later work, the former an attempt to find artistic freedom within an adequate determinism, and the latter the resolution to recognize world and self in their radical necessity. / 2026-01-31T00:00:00Z

After graduating from the Literae Humaniores course, which after the mid-nineteenth century came to revolve around Plato’s Republic, Walter Pater’s (1839-1894) professional duties spanning thirty years at Oxford were those of a philosophy teacher and lecturer of Plato. This thesis examines Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism in his work, from his earliest known piece, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Plato is an ideal philosopher, critic, and artist to Pater, exemplifying a literary craftsman who blends genres with the highest authority. Platonism is a point of contact with several of Pater’s contemporaries, such as Arnold and Wilde, from which we can take new measure of their critical relationships regarding aestheticism and Decadence. Pater’s idea of aesthetic education takes Platonism for its model, which heightens one’s awareness of reality in the recognition of form and matter. Platonism also provides a framework for critical encounters with figures across history, such as Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism, evident even in his fiction, seeks the mind of the author, so that his writing enacts Platonic love. Through close reading, we highlight his many references to Plato, identify Platonic subjects and themes, and explore etymological nuances in the very selection of his words, which often reveals a Platonic tendency of refinement towards immateriality, from seen to unseen beauty. As a teacher and an author Pater helped shape Oxonian Platonism, and through his writing we examine how Platonism informs his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style.

This thesis examines Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” as the product of Wilde’s long interest in critic Walter Pater’s literature and scholarship. From its first iteration published in 1889, through Wilde’s ongoing revision and expansion into the version commonly anthologized today, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is an evolving work that mirrors Wilde’s enduring relationship with the art and ideas of his former teacher. This relationship is explored in three contexts: Pater’s contribution to Wilde’s understanding of the Renaissance period; the steady influence of Pater’s ideas and persona on Wilde’s other major works from the period that saw the publication and revision of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.;” and the particular influence of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits on the structure and themes of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” Because of Pater’s extensive writings on art, and Wilde’s passionate interest in the subject, many of these intersections occur around the image of the portrait in Wilde’s work.

The Victorians saw more portraits than any generation before them. While the eighteenth century has been named 'the age of portraiture', portraits pervaded nineteenth-century society like never before. With the invention of photography, coupled with technological advancements in low-cost printing methods, the medium in which faces could be recorded was revolutionised, the classes of society that could afford to be immortalised expanded, and the spaces in which portraits were seen proliferated. These spaces included the public gallery, photography studio shop windows, and personal photograph albums. They also included the art periodical, biography, fiction, and poetry as the experience of portraiture became distinctly textual as well as visual. This thesis draws upon art history alongside literary, museum, and material studies to explore the creative exchange that developed between portrait viewership and reading practices in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Taking the establishment of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856 as its starting point, the thesis tracks the changing idea of the portrait gallery through its literary reception. It takes the portrait gallery to mean the physical space in which portraits were exhibited, and the conceptual idea of collecting, arranging, and interacting with portraits that permeated into the literary world. By focussing on the work of Edmund Gosse, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and Vernon Lee, the thesis forms a 'gallery' of nineteenth-century tastemakers, each of whom looked to the democratic art of portraiture to reflect upon their literary art. How did portraits and texts interact in the mid- to late nineteenth century? In what ways did writers adapt the conventions of portraiture and the portrait gallery for the written text? This thesis seeks to answer these questions and provide new narratives about the complex relationship between the visual and the verbal in nineteenth-century culture. It observes the Victorian 'culture of art' with a more focussed eye to illuminate how the conditions of viewing, circulating, and collecting portraits specific to the period allowed the portrait gallery to serve as a particularly compelling arena for the literary imagination. Gosse, Pater, Hardy, and Lee tested the inherent limitations of portraiture as an art of imitation to realise its imaginative capacity for communicating with close and distant, contemporary and historic figures. They recognised that writing offered a valuable way of constructing the affective conversations that could be had with - and the stories that could be told about - portraits and portrait collections. With the proliferation of portraits came the problem and the opportunity of organising them.

My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

The Program of the Czech Decadent Movement and the Question of Intertextuality. The Work of Miloš Marten This thesis explores the work of Miloš Marten (1883-1917) seeking to analyse its decadent narrative as a modern narrative that brings into play the unity between the pinnacle and the decline. It departs from the comparison between the style and interpretation of the two versions of Cyklus rozkoše a smrti (orig. The Cycle of delight and death; 1907 and 1917/1925) and the study of the realisations of this work. For this purpose the study contextually examines the conceptions of "intertextuality" from fin de siècle authors-critics, meaning their conceptualisations of similarity and/or identity of literary works which frequently involve a confluence of degeneration theory, the argument of the non-ethical nature of plagiarism and theory of decadence. All were often used as instruments of disqualification as well as justifications for a modern aesthetics and style. Reconstitution of Marten's theoretical reflection on artistic genres evidences his research of a harmonizing modern culture within an anti-syncretic tendency: mythology and revolt against myth Order being shifted to tragedy and parable, while the novel is designed as an analytical-critical synthesis. Applying contemporary approaches to...