Walter Pater:
Transparencies of Desire
editors Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, Carolyn Williams

The ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance advises the responsive critic to consider carefully ‘the various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age’. Transparencies of Desire brings together twenty-one varied, contentious, informative essays that confirm Pater's ongoing power to captivate and challenge readers. The interdisciplinary breadth of the collection demonstrates that the critical culture of Pater studies is always multifaceted--inviting diverse theoretical perspectives yet also demanding that any paradigm of analysis (feminist, new historicist, aesthetic, queer theory, formalist, biographical, Foucauldian) be tested and redefined.

Scholars from five different countries reconsider Pater's career and canon, the reception of his works, the intersections of genre, gender, and aesthetics, and the implications of Pater's writings--in aesthetics, fiction, philosophy, archaeology, art history--for contemporary cultural studies.

CONTENTS
James Eli Adams. Transparencies of Desire: An Introduction

CONSIDERING THE CAREER
Angela Leighton. Aesthetic Conditions: Returning to Pater   - Laurel Brake. The Entangling Dance: Pater after Marius, 1885-1891

VIEWING PATER'S RECEPTION
Lesley Higgins. No Time for Pater: The Silenced Other of Masculinist Modernism   - Stephen Bann. Pater's Reception in France: A Provisional Account - Robert Vilain. The Reception of Walter Pater in Germany and Austria

CONTEXTUALIZING THE WORK: HISTORY, ARCHAEOLOGY, ART HISTORY
Jeffrey Wallen. Physiology, Mesmerism and Walter Pater's ‘Susceptibilities to Influence’ - Shawn Malley. Disturbing Hellenism: Walter Pater, Charles Newton, and the Myth of Demeter and Persephone - Stefano Evangelista.  ‘Outward Nature and the Moods of Men’: Romantic Mythology in Pater's Essays on Dionysus and Demeter - Paul Tucker. ‘Reanimate Greek’: Pater and Ruskin on Botticelli - Jonah Siegel. ‘Schooling Leonardo’: Collaboration, Desire, and the Challenge of Attribution in Pater - Rachel Teukolsky. The Politics of Formalist Art Criticism: Pater's ‘School of Giorgione’

PATERIAN GENRES & GENDERS: Maureen Moran. Pater's ‘Great Change’: Marius the Epicurean as Historical Conversion Romance - Matthew Kaiser. Marius at Oxford: Paterian Pedagogy and the Ethics of Seduction - Martine Lambert-Charbonnier. Poetics of Ekphrasis in Pater's ‘Imaginary Portraits’ - Elisa Bizzotto. The Imaginary Portrait: Pater's Contribution to a Literary Genre - Phyllis C. James. Beauty's New ‘Hour’: Paterian Aesthticism in the Short Fiction of Olivia Shakespear’

CURRENT CRITICAL THEORY : Jacques Khalip. Pater's Body of Work - Kit Andrews. Walter Pater and Walter Benjamin: The Diaphanous Collector and the Angel of History - Michael F. Davis. Walter Pater's ‘Latent Intelligence’ and the Conception of Queer ‘Theory’ - Megan Becker-Leckrone.  Pater's Critical Spirit

ISBN 0-944318-16-9 xiv, 380 pp.  £35.00