Book contents
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Pater and English Literature
- Part I General
- Introduction to Part I
- Chapter 1 ‘Of the true family of Montaigne’: Appreciations and the Essay Tradition in English Literature
- Chapter 2 Unravelling Pater’s English Poet: The Imaginary Portrait as Criticism
- Chapter 3 Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader
- Chapter 4 Studies in European Literature: Pater’s Cosmopolitan Criticism
- Chapter 5 The ‘Postscript’
- Chapter 6 Form, Matter, and Metaphysics in Walter Pater’s Essay on ‘Style’
- Chapter 7 Walter Pater, Second-Hand Stylist
- Part II Individual Authors: Early Moderns, Romantics, Contemporaries
- Postscript
- Walter Pater and English Studies: A Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Chapter 4 - Studies in European Literature: Pater’s Cosmopolitan Criticism
from Part I - General
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2023
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Pater and English Literature
- Part I General
- Introduction to Part I
- Chapter 1 ‘Of the true family of Montaigne’: Appreciations and the Essay Tradition in English Literature
- Chapter 2 Unravelling Pater’s English Poet: The Imaginary Portrait as Criticism
- Chapter 3 Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader
- Chapter 4 Studies in European Literature: Pater’s Cosmopolitan Criticism
- Chapter 5 The ‘Postscript’
- Chapter 6 Form, Matter, and Metaphysics in Walter Pater’s Essay on ‘Style’
- Chapter 7 Walter Pater, Second-Hand Stylist
- Part II Individual Authors: Early Moderns, Romantics, Contemporaries
- Postscript
- Walter Pater and English Studies: A Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
In parallel with the establishment of English as an academic subject, Pater’s lifetime coincided with the institutionalisation of Modern Languages as an independent field of study within British universities. Pater’s contribution to the debate over a School of English at Oxford must therefore be understood in relation to his involvement with the Oxford School of Modern Languages and with the cultural and social space of the Taylorian Institution. In 1890, Pater was invited to contribute to the prestigious Taylor Lectures, which were designed to promote the study of modern European languages and literatures. The resulting lecture and essay, ‘Prosper Mérimée’, presents the French writer as a cosmopolitan and cultural mediator. After Pater’s death, the first series of Taylor lectures was collected in a volume entitled Studies in European Literature (1900). Reading the essay on Mérimée in the context of that volume enables us to see Pater as an advocate of a comparative approach to literature and as rejecting the nationalist mentality in which the rise of English in universities found itself implicated.
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- Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies , pp. 88 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023