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.
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