Harold Bloom's selection of Pater's writings brings together in one volume the most important sections and passages from The Renaissance, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, Plato and Platonism, Greek Studies, and Sketches and Reviews, as well as "The Child in the House." Pater, the chief aesthetician and literary critic of Victorian England, brought his powerful imagination to bear on a wide range of subjects: from the drama of Euripides to the painters of the Renaissance, from the Romantic poets to the pre-Raphaelites, from Plato to Oscar Wilde. In the twentieth century, Pater's theories of art and literature exerted a strong inluence on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stevens.

Pater's first major work, a study of kindred spirits in love of beauty. Criticized as a "demoralizing moralizer".--Jim Kepner ; Oscar Wilde's favorite book by Pater (Greif, p. 157) ; Includes essays on Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, da Vinci and Winckelmann.

Concise and illuminating articles explore Oscar Wilde's life and work in the context of the turbulent landscape of his time.

Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture is the first monograph to discuss the Victorian critic Walter Pater's attitude to sculpture. Bringing together Pater's aesthetic theories with his theories on language and writing, it demonstrates how his ideas of the visual and written language are closely interlinked. This study throws new light on the extraordinary complexity and coherence of Pater's writing, and repositions him solidly within Victorian art and literature.