The Collected Works of Walter Pater Imaginary Portraits

Imaginary Portraits is Volume 3 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life.

Pater's Imaginary Portraits are among some of the most stylish and original pieces of short fiction in Victorian literature: portrayals of a series of handsome male protagonists across the ages of European history, set against a range of evocative European backdrops from Classical Greece to Medieval France, eighteenth-century Germany and modern England. Together, they constitute a remarkable testimony to Pater's profound understanding of centuries of cultural history, reworked in the hybrid genre of the imaginary portrait as sophisticated portrait miniatures of minor characters touched and affected by major moments in European history. They question central issues of nationhood and belonging, a Pan-European cultural identity, and the fate of the individual in the face of collective history. As formative texts for Modernist writers like Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf, Pater's Imaginary Portraits had an impact which reached far beyond the nineteenth century.

Lene Ostermark-Johansen, University of Copenhagen

Lene Ostermark-Johansen teaches English art and literature at the University of Copenhagen and is a Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She has a long-standing interest in word-image relations and has published extensively on Walter Pater and a range of other late nineteenth-century writers. Ostermark-Johansen is the author of Sweetness and Strength: The Reception of Michelangelo in Late Victorian England (1998) and of Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (2011). She is currently working on a monograph on Pater and portraiture.