The Professor of Desire: Walter Pater in the Nineties (His and Ours)

Abstract

Claims much recent analysis of Pater approaches his work as a legitimation of homoerotic desire, countering the subtle homophobia informing much modernist reception of Pater and renewing attention to his original audiences, thus illuminating a neglected social dimension of his writing. Believes early readers of Pater considered sexuality of less moment than gendered constructions of literary labor, within which Pater’s pursuit of “pulsations” was attacked as a form of effeminacy. Seen in this light, Pater’s subsequent preoccupation with the “manliness” of art is less a defensive response to homophobia than an effort to reconstruct a traditionally feminized ethical stance as an eminently masculine self-discipline.