Collected Works of Walter Pater, Volume V

Studies and Reviews, 1864-1889 is volume five in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. It brings together, for the first time, Pater's essays, reviews, and articles that were published in the press and not reprinted in their original form in his books. These include several texts that have not been republished since their first appearance. The volume thus offers a richer, more comprehensive overview of Pater's literary journalism, highlighting his management of his career in a rapidly evolving print media landscape, across publications such as the Westminster Review, the Academy, the Fortnightly Review, Macmillan's Magazine, The Guardian, and the Pall Mall Gazette. Most significantly, it reveals his strategies for navigating a hostile environment of conservative and homophobic critics, editors, and publishers who were opposed to the 'art for art's sake' aestheticism that Pater advocated. The volume demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of Pater's interests. It features lengthy pieces on William Morris, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, European Romanticism, and Giordano Bruno, and shorter pieces on topics ranging from prose style, poetry, art history, theatre history, religious issues, philosophy, English as a university subject, and contemporary French fiction. Also included in the volume are Pater's reviews of works by his friends and contemporaries such as Sidney Colvin, Vernon Lee, J. W. Mackail, Marc-André Raffalovich, George Saintsbury, J. A. Symonds, Arthur Symons, and Mary Ward, revealing his participation in a ubiquitous practice of reciprocal reviews, facilitated by the prevailing trend for anonymity in reviewing. The volume offers a comprehensive critical introduction, a chronology of Pater's life and contemporary events, extensive explanatory notes, and four appendices.

Laurel Brake is Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests include nineteenth-century Media History and Print Culture, Walter Pater, Gender, and Digital Humanities. She is currently writing a biography of Walter and Clara Pater for OUP. She has published widely on Pater and his circle, and on the nineteenth-century press. She was the co-founder of the Pater Newsletter (now SWPA). Books include Print in Transition 1850-1910. She is the co-editor of the Dictionary of 19C Journalism, and the PI of ncse, a free, digital edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals: https://ncse.ac.uk. She recently co-edited a special issue of the Victorian Periodicals Review on book reviewing. Robyn Jakeman is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She completed her PhD at Birkbeck and a postdoctoral fellowship at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She has written a monograph on Futurism and literary modernism (in press), and is currently a co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Wyndham Lewis and the Arts, for which she has also written a chapter on Lewis and Aestheticism. She has also written for Modernism/Modernity and the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse). She has taught at Birkbeck, London South Bank University, and VUB.