Walter Pater, best known as the author of The Renaissance (1873) and as Oscar Wilde's tutor and friend, was a leading figure in European aestheticism and British fin-de-siecle culture. Despite this, he has received only limited critical attention, and has tended to be read conservatively. Drawing on Pater's unpublished manuscripts, Giles Whiteley challenges this view of Pater as a closeted don who spent the remainder of his life regretting the excesses of his Renaissance.

Focusing on Pater's reading of the German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, Whiteley argues that Pater's response...

Oscar Wilde is more than a name, more than an author. From precocious Oxford undergraduate to cause cElEbre of the West End of the 1890s, to infamous criminal, the proper name Wilde has become an event in the history of literature and culture. Taking Wilde seriously as a philosopher in his own right, Whiteley's groundbreaking book places his texts into their philosophical context in order to show how Wilde broke from his peers, and in particular from idealism, and challenges recent neo-historicist readings of Wilde which seem content to limit his irruptive power. Using the paradoxical concept...

This book examines the various ways in which the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling was read and responded to by British readers and writers during the nineteenth century.