The Collected Works of Walter Pater: Classical Studies: Volume 8

Classical Studies is Volume 8 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended ‘the love of art for its own sake’, developed a new genre of prose fiction (the ‘imaginary portrait’), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made ‘style’ the watchword for creativity and life.Pater carried this spirit into his studies of Greek mythology and sculpture in the 1870s and 1880s–among the most important encounters of any Victorian writer with the classical tradition. Pater’s classical studies offer revisionary accounts of the myths of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and undertake original interpretations of the history of Greek sculpture and tragedy. Pater approaches Greek myth and art from the perspective of what he famously called ‘aesthetic criticism’: with an eye to their beauty and the ways they speak to modern life. Pater’s interpretations of classical culture cut against the grain of the high Victorian appreciation of ancient Greece, and were attentive to the dark side of antiquity, highlighting its depths of emotion, its dissident sexuality, its gaudy colours, and its transgressive challenges to the ruling order.