The Rhetorical Use of Provocation as a Means of Persuasion in the Writings of Walter Pater (1839-1894), English Essayist and Cultural Critic : Pater as Controversialist

This work explores Pater's work as a public act undertaken to persuade his readers.

Rather than thematic analysis or psychological speculation, it argues that Pater is more profitably approached by examining how his style worked to win over the public and by looking at the views he sought to challenge.

The book follows the development of his career beginning with his criticism of Swinburne's emotional and historical assumptions, and of Ruskin's excessive moralism.

It next explores Pater's method of defending himself from attack by the bishop of Oxford and W.H.

Mallock and of justifying his critical method of 'appreciation'.

Pater's defence of aesthetic as against philosophical apprehension, his questioning of a spiritually superior attitude associated with Marcus Aurelius and his rebuttal of Wilde's parasitic distortion of his thought are the topics next handled.

The study then examines Pater's revision of E.B. Tylor's attitudes to myth and Newman's to religion; those of Renan to early Christianity, the Goncourts to Watteau, Matthew Arnold's to Spinoza, Seeley's to Goethe and Heine's to paganism. A chapter dealing with 'Style' explores Pater's opposition to Saintsbury and one on Prosper Merimee his reservations about the French writer.

The book's final chapter on 'Lacedaemon' draws a disturbing analogy between ancient Sparta and Victorian England.

This work tells the story of his attempt, through opposition to others, to define and defend his ideal of aesthetic contemplation.