Author: Walter Pater
Year: 1873
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Genres/categories:
Art, Free books, History, Poetry, Essays, Philosophy
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ISBNs:
9780192835536
9780486440255
019283553X
0486440257 |
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'To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
The Renaissance (1873) at once became the touchstone for the decadent imagination for a generation of Oxford undergraduates. Pater was shocked at the reaction his book inspired: 'I wish they would not call me a hedonist, it gives such a wrong impression to those who do not know Greek.'.
The book had begun as a series of idiosyncratic, impressionistic critical essays on those artists that embodied for him the spirit of the Renaissance; by collecting them and adding his infamous Conclusion, Pater gained a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. But The Renaissance survives as one of the most innovative pieces of cultural criticism to emerge from the nineteenth century.
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