Article ID: CBB273897021

"Sinister Exile": Dionysus and the Aesthetics of Race in Walter Pater and Vernon Lee (2021)

unapi

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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Authors & Contributors
Autumn Womack
Fretwell, Erica
Martinson, T. J.
Denisoff, Dennis
Kaag, John J.
Forrester, Stefan
Concepts
Aesthetics
Philosophy
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Science and race
Science and literature
Epistemology
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century, early
Enlightenment
Places
Great Britain
Germany
United States
Prussia (Germany)
Americas
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