Chapter 2 - Unravelling Pater’s English Poet: The Imaginary Portrait as Criticism

Summary

With his ‘imaginary portraits’, Pater developed a hybrid genre blending biography with travel writing, fiction, and criticism. The cross-pollination between Pater’s fiction and his essays remained strong throughout his career. This chapter explores how Pater employed the genre to engage with both English and French critics (Arnold, Newman, Sainte-Beuve) in the debates about the relations between reading, writing, the individual, and the nation through a series of character sketches. Seen in the light of an unfinished manuscript for a lecture on English literature, Pater’s early imaginary portraits raise questions of periodisation, of how far back the beginnings of English literature could be traced, while essentially questioning its Englishness. Stressing the significance of medieval rather than Elizabethan literature in the formation of a national canon, Pater selected Chaucer as the proclaimed father of English literature, thus selecting a writer with a profound European background, whose character sketches in The Canterbury Tales in some respects became precursors of Pater’s own studies of the individual.