The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic's role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater's "A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew" (1876) and Lee's "Dionea" (1890) partake of Immanuel Kant's understanding of race as a matter of aesthetic perception, yet call into question his attempt to maintain distinct and essential racial categories. By affirming the universality of anti-rationalistic Dionysian experiences, Pater and Lee interrogate the racial logic of Kantian aesthetics on primarily aestheticist grounds, as part of their commitment to dismantling rationalistic intellectual frameworks that place unnecessary limits upon our perceptions of the world and of each other.
...More
Article
Lanzoni, Susan;
(2009)
Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee's Aesthetics of Empathy
(/isis/citation/CBB000932855/)
Thesis
Goldstein, Amanda Jo;
(2011)
“Sweet Science”: Romantic Materialism and the New Sciences of Life
(/isis/citation/CBB001567306/)
Article
T. J. Martinson;
(2019)
Sense and Supersensibility: Kantian Aesthetics in Lamarckian Evolutionary Theory
(/isis/citation/CBB019213234/)
Book
Autumn Womack;
(2022)
The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930
(/isis/citation/CBB242416698/)
Article
John J. Kaag;
(2015)
The Lot of the Beautiful: Pragmatism and Aesthetic Ideals
(/isis/citation/CBB055986571/)
Article
Stefan Forrester;
(2020)
Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kant Problem’: metaphysics, science, and art
(/isis/citation/CBB068647714/)
Book
Finseth, Ian Frederick;
(2009)
Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770--1860
(/isis/citation/CBB001231161/)
Book
Erica Fretwell;
(2020)
Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling
(/isis/citation/CBB457783202/)
Chapter
Levine, George;
(2013)
Darwin and the Art of Paradox
(/isis/citation/CBB001422078/)
Article
Dennis Denisoff;
(2021)
The Lie of the Land: Decadence, Ecology, and Arboreal Communications
(/isis/citation/CBB852324159/)
Article
Blindermann, Charles S.;
(1982)
Huxley, Pater, and protoplasm
(/isis/citation/CBB000023925/)
Chapter
Benson, Donald R.;
(1987)
“Catching the light”: Physics and art in Walter Pater's cultural context
(/isis/citation/CBB000044267/)
Article
Towheed, Shafquat;
(2006)
The Creative Evolution of Scientific Paradigms: Vernon Lee and the Debate over the Hereditary Transmission of Acquired Characters
(/isis/citation/CBB001030106/)
Article
Andrews, Kit;
(2011)
Walter Pater as Oxford Hegelian: Plato and Platonism and T. H. Green's “Prolegomena to Ethics”
(/isis/citation/CBB001230826/)
Book
Fabio Minazzi;
(2021)
Epistemologia storico-evolutiva e neorealismo logico
(/isis/citation/CBB163381119/)
Article
Camilla Flodin;
(2018)
Adorno and Schelling on the Art–Nature Relation
(/isis/citation/CBB804298788/)
Book
Allison, Henry E.;
(2001)
Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment
(/isis/citation/CBB000102190/)
Thesis
Grindstaff, Beverly K.;
(2004)
Designing the Mensch als Kunstwerk: Kant, Hygiene and the Aesthetics of Health in Wilhelmine Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB001561847/)
Book
Bindman, David;
(2002)
Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000301542/)
Article
Guyer, Paul;
(2008)
The Psychology of Kant's Aesthetics
(/isis/citation/CBB000931153/)
Be the first to comment!