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John Ruskin’s claim that what is essential in all art is to fashion by hand what the eye sees clearly, blurred the divide between the fine arts and the decorative arts. Advocating a renewed experience of nature proper to disclose truth to the beholder, he inspired William Morris with a new form of interior design that promoted craftsmanship as a way to counter mass production and restore man’s dignity. The revival of the gothic style was for him a way to renew Victorian culture by emphasizing the close observation of nature, as well as the values of craftsmanship. While the decorative arts created an environment conducive to a better appreciation of natural beauty, they also sheltered the aesthete from the ugliness of the industrial age. Patterns designed by Morris were loved by aesthetes who wanted their homes to mirror their dreams and aspirations and who embraced Walter Pater’s epicurean aesthetics. Pater’s celebration of music in The Renaissance as the ideal towards which all arts aspire, fostered the idea of interior design as a musical composition enhancing pure perception for the aesthetic mind. The essay examines to what extent aesthetic interiors show this ambiguity between the desire to re-discover natural beauty and truth and the retreat into aesthetic dreams.

Walter Pater’s description of Mona Lisa in The Renaissance (1873) turns the famous picture – which as a portrait gives the faithful image of a real person – into a symbol of human aspirations. Considering the painter as a rival of nature, Leonardo da Vinci creates beauty and life in his art, while Mona Lisa embodies the ideal of the Renaissance with its emphasis on experience and the senses which fin-de-siècle writers find so akin to the modern spirit. The transition from mimesis to symbolism in the painting is conveyed by the colour perspective, in particular the sfumato, the interplay of light and shadow introduced by Leonardo which seems to veil the picture in darkness. Thus “behind the veil” the painter expresses his quest for harmony and fertility in the cosmos, a meaning decadent writers are keen to subvert to make the picture a symbol of corruption and passion.

Old age in Walter Pater's works is the time when the individual has the opportunity to think thoroughly upon life and culture. The feeling of growing old may first engender melancholy and bitterness as one considers all those lost days of youth. However, Pater's characters generally take the opportunity to start again and fulfill their quest of wisdom. Old people are more sympathetic with the sorrows of humankind. Looking back upon their own past, they remember their childhood and their first experiences and reflect on their own identity, on the human condition and on culture. Ageing is also an essential element in the arts, especially in architecture as buildings mature and ripen in the course of years and centuries. Old worn stones, old aesthetic forms are for future generations witnesses of immemorial times, allowing Pater's nineteenth-century arts critic to spiritually restore the past and contribute to the development of culture thoughout the ages.

The hypertext is becoming a new medium for scholarship, allowing quick and universal sharing of knowledge as well as providing for scholarly criticism a new text model. Walter Pater raised the issue of scholarship in his time and his view may help us assess how the hypertext could best be used in Paterian studies. The hypertext may be appropriate for highlighting intertextuality and presenting Pater’s extensive culture. However, is the author’s intention not undermined when texts are opened to other texts while Pater saw his works as fully composed structures? The problem is even more complex when it comes to hypermedia. The hypertext suggests a new area of research around time/space scale shifts in Pater’s works, for which Jacques Fontanille’s comparative semiotics provide a methodology. After raising the issue of scholarship, the hypertext then leads us to consider Pater’s style in a new light and to explore relations between literature and the spatial arts in his works.

This article suggests that 'appreciation' as defined by Walter Pater is a genre of criticism distinguished from that of Matthew Arnold's critical practice and theory. I consider how appreciation functions as a critical mode in Pater's periodical reviews, testing Pater's resolve in how he manages it in respect to reviews of books on controversial subjects such as religion, aestheticism, and revolution. The article ends with a case study of Pater's signed review of W. S. Lilly's critique of the French Revolution in a book published during its centenary in 1889, a review that exemplifies the high stakes of reviewing and Pater's review at this time, just as Appreciations is published. The case study explores how the genre of appreciation meets the challenges of the timing of the review; the site of its publication; and Pater's relationship to the author, to the editor, and to his own publisher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Walter Pater's thought within the broader philosophical inquiry of his generation into the fundamental nature of experience. Across his works, Pater sets forth an original theory of intersubjectivity grounded in close analysis of emblematic "scenes of contact" in the sphere of art. His concepts of "touch," "impress," and the "scene of human experience" show how the artwork participates in broader relationships that make social existence possible. The affinity of these concepts to Wilhelm Dilthey's contemporaneous theories of lived experience, expression and understanding shows Pater's participation in an emerging intellectual paradigm. Taken together, these readings offer an alternative to accounts of Pater as a materialist, an impressionist, or a hedonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And those studying court cases often sought to determine the place of Jews qua Jews rather than asking how Jews fit or did not fit into general patterns in the city. This special issue of I Medieval Encounters i offers new perspectives for studying the activities and the roles of Jews in the medieval economy.[1] Scholarship to date has tended to approach these subjects from a communal perspective, discussing the activities of Jews as an organized group rather than as individuals, and emphasizing collective norms, legislation, ideologies, and policies. Taken together these articles demonstrate that in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, multiple forms of business relationships existed between Jews and Jews and between Jews and Christians. [Extracted from the article]

This essay argues that Oscar Wilde's story "The Canterville Ghost", written in 1886 and published in February and March of 1887, was a response to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (to which was appended the now famous Labouchère Amendment outlawing 'gross indecency' between men) and more particularly to W.T. Stead's scandalous newspaper story, "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon", written in support of the bill and published in the Pall Mall Gazette in July of 1885. Wilde takes the central plot of Stead's sensational story of older men pursuing young virgins into secret chambers in order to victimise them and radically inverts it. In doing so he inverts not only a patriarchal ideology and an associated psychology, but also one of their major corollaries, the prohibition of same-sex desire. In its place he proposes a counter-fiction that authorises a counter-fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay aims to refute received, persistent misconceptions of Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and of aestheticism generally, as an asocial and amoral sensualism, and as a deliberate separating of art from human lives and the world. Contrary to these misconceptions, it finds a humanist ethical vision in The Renaissance, specifically in the essays Pater devotes to Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Drawing on an established post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic tradition of Victorian secular humanism, Pater defines this vision in terms of human sympathies for the feelings and suffering of other persons. And he defines it in aesthetic terms, in terms of art's unique capacity to depict human feelings and suffering, and thereby to arouse sympathies in the viewer. At the same time, the essay contends that Pater in The Renaissance also defines his ethical vision in a more unprecedented, radical way. Beyond the solicitation of human sympathies, he frames it in terms of a fundamental uncertainty and unpredictability, a fundamental freedom and singularity, of human ethical relationships and responses. For Pater, this uncertainty and freedom are the qualities that make an ethics genuinely ethical. Pater finds these qualities, and this kind of genuine ethics, epitomized in the unpredictability and freedom of human aesthetic responses, including his own, to art and beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a group of conversos families from Spain, who established themselves in Palermo after the Expulsion of the Jews in 1492. There they supported financial activities of the Nazione Catalana and established strong relationships with the local aristocracy. Thanks to this alliance, they managed to avoid persecution by the Spanish Inquisition, "cleanse" their "impure" blood and reach high positions within politics and society: feudal titles, political and financial offices, habits of military orders, ecclesiastical appointments and sometimes even sainthood. Firstly, the paper will give a brief sketch of the phenomenon of conversos in Sicily as well as the activities of the Spanish Inquisition before and after the expulsion of 1492. A significant case study will then be presented, focusing on the Torongi family (New Christians from Majorca settled in Palermo) and its network of relationships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a Cold War climate of paranoia regarding secret identities and communist plots, California-based artist George Herms realized artworks attributed to fictional artist-authors: Eric Hammerscoffer, Paul Mistrie, Iris Firewater, Sigmund Fletcher, Astropoet Moonstone, and Tarzan Feathers. The lives of these imaginary artists were narrated in outlandish biographies, and their artworks were displayed in museum and gallery exhibitions. Rather than simply presenting work under a different name (a pseudonym), Herms deployed the literary technique of heteronymy—which is both a tool (a heteronym) and a conceptual strategy. Herms’s heteronymous practice comprised presenting work by distinct personae, each of whom differed from the others in terms of aesthetic style, philosophy, personality, and life story. By advertising the fictional status of the attributed artists, and doing so alongside documentation of their existence, Herms galvanized the problematic space connecting a named artist-author to his/her/their artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tiempos Modernos is the property of Tiempos Modernos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Tiempos Modernos is the property of Tiempos Modernos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the last decades scholars of Victorian literature, modernism, gender and art history have investigated Walter Pater's complex literary texts and essays from new angles. Due to the intense cross-cultural, intermedial and interdisciplinary nature of his work Pater is still a topical writer. Against the backdrop of current academic debates on intermediality, transculturality, cultural memory, 'biofiction' and the construction of classical antiquity this article readdresses Pater as an ekphrastic writer and innovative historian of culture. His imaginary portrait 'Denys l'Auxerrois' is read as a comparative, transcultural and transhistorical narrative which allowed Pater to transgress disciplinary boundaries, to experiment with the Victorian genre rules, to fathom the relationships of the media and to contribute significantly to historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Pater's theoretical "come-back" over the past forty years or so has been dominated by the competing claims of the new historicism and deconstruction, both of which discover prescient forerunners of their own, seemingly mutually exclusive, theoretical concerns in Pater's aesthetic criticism and in his historical novel "Marius the Epicurean" (1885). Yet despite their obvious differences, both critical approaches share one thing in common: the same post-humanist denigration of the trope of metaphor in favor of the seemingly more ethically responsive (because inclusive) trope of metonymy. In this essay I observe how the new historicism's and deconstruction's privilegings of metonymy as the prime trope of difference poses an immediate problem for ethical thought that, largely under the influence of Alain Badiou, has become increasingly cognizant of the need for a workable conception of sameness (or universality), traditionally supplied by metaphor. Accordingly, this close reading of the metaphorical dialectic of one of Pater's surprisingly underread "Imaginary Portraits," "Sebastian van Storck" (1887), explores the basic charge against metaphor—namely, that it is an essentially "theological" trope insofar as it invariably pre-posits the "identity" that it modestly claims to have merely discovered. Employing the central figure of Sebastian's idealism—equation—I venture that, once rethought as a relation not of identity but of equivalence, metaphor is capable of shouldering the rhetorical burden of similarity without relinquishing its ethical claim as a primary producer of new differences in the world and is, hence, deserving of a central place in a post-deconstructive ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]