Imaginary Portraits (Aesthetics Today) Book

Out of print for decades, the enchanting classics in this new edition of Walter Pater's Imaginary Portraits will be welcomed by teachers and students of literature, art history, and aesthetics. First published in 1887, these "imaginary portraits" are not biographies, but fictionalized accounts of historic figures, written by this esteemed nineteenth-century scholar of Renaissance art and literature. Each shares a common search for a new aesthetic, a pursuit of beauty that anticipated the modern movement in prose and poetry and helped to define aesthetics in the twentieth century. Pater's earnest philosophy of beauty inspired many of the earliest voices of modernism, from his student Oscar Wilde to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. This treasured edition includes such celebrated works as The Child in the House, out of print since 1904, and the unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour. Co-published with the School of Visual Arts as part of the Aesthetics Today series.Read More