Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Literature

Walter Pater's significance for the institutionalisation of English Studies at British Universities in the nineteenth century is often overlooked. Addressing the importance of his volume Appreciations (1889) in placing English literature in both a national and an international context, this book demonstrates the indebtedness of the English essay to the French tradition and brings together the classic, the Romantic, the English, and the European. With essays on drama, prose, and poetry, from Shakespeare and Browne to Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Pater's contemporaries Rossetti and Morris, Appreciations exemplifies ideals of aesthetic criticism formulated in Pater's first book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Subjectivity pervades Pater's essays on the English authors, while bringing out their exceptional qualities in a manner reaching far into twentieth-century criticism.