Selected Essays

An annotated edition of selected essays by the major Victorian writer and aesthete Walter Horatio Pater, this volume brings together a generous selection of nonfiction writings on literature, art, history, philosophy and mythology, supported by a critical and biographical introduction and extensive explanatory notes. The essays range in subject from archaic Greece to the culture of Pater’s own day, and they are all, as Wilde called them, "delicately wrought works of art" by an exceptional writer and a passionately delicate thinker.

Walter Horatio Pater began publishing critical essays on literature and art in several magazines in the 1860s, and gradually he gained a reputation for fine, idiosyncratic prose, sceptical philosophy, and a distinctive aestheticist outlook. His collections include Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which made his name as a stylist and perceptive critic, and Appreciations (1889). Pater died of heart failure in Oxford in 1894. Alex Wong is a literary scholar living in Cambridge, where he is currently a Research Fellow of St John’s College. His critical work includes?The Poetry of Kissing in Early Modern Europe?(2017).?Poems Without Irony, his?first collection of his own verse, was published by Carcanet in 2016.