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 the0hybrid 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.

Correspondence is vol. ix 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 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. For the first time, all the known correspondence of Walter Pater has been assembled and fully annotated, including letters exchanged with his main publisher, the Macmillans, for more than two decades. Pertinent letters written after his death by his sisters Clara and Hester Pater are also included. The Correspondence provides a richer, much more complete overview of Pater's academic, professional, and personal lives and demonstrates how vigorously he participated in some of the most important literary and cultural networks of the Victorian era.

Based upon the author's Representative English literature. of.