This chapter surveys Pater’s ‘widely diffused’ contributions to early twentieth-century modernist poetry, prose, and aesthetic discourse. It provides insights into Pater’s influence on modernist writers including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, addressing the unevenness of his reception among Anglo-American modernists and the source of the ambivalence that often defined this. Its first section concentrates on how Pater’s literary impressionism anticipated modernist interiority and so can be seen reflected in works including Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Its second section turns to the rejection of Pater by T. S. Eliot – and how Pater nevertheless haunts his works.

The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga is a perfect vehicle for tracing the history of emotions, in that it offers an unparalleled darkening of mood over time. This chapter refers to William Thynne's great Chaucerian opera omnia and specifically to his including Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid immediately after Troilus and Criseyde. Giovanni Boccaccio marks the turn from pre-articulate emotional excess to regulated literary expression. James Simpson describes how Renaissance England essentially reduced and simplified the rich multiplicity of medieval literary forms and registers. Geoffrey Chaucer recognizes the popular aspects of Boccaccio's ottava rima verse form because many of its tags, tropes and epithets derived from the street singers of cantare are shared by an equivalent English verse tradition: tail rhyme romance. There is a solid internal evidence of William Shakespeare's familiarity with the Testament, or with the Troilus-Testament complex.

How did Victorian authors conceive of the rise of an extraction-based society? This chapter looks to the literary archive for early impressions of industrial mining’s wider social significance. Thanks to the new role of fossil fuels in nineteenth-century industry, the Victorian period saw a massive acceleration of mining in terms of the depths plumbed and volumes extracted. Mining operations in Britain and overseas were becoming a source of wide public attention at this time as the economy and culture shifted toward those of an extraction-based society, one grounded in the extraction of finite underground materials. This chapter explores the depiction of extraction in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 protest poem “The Cry of the Children,” Joseph Skipsey’s 1878 poem “Mother Wept,” Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations, and William Jevons’s 1865 study The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines.

Across the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Rudyard Kipling, the dominant blue ecology conceived of the ocean as infinite, unfathomable, and thus impervious to human activity. Humans could not threaten it; rather, it threatened them – a relation Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson emblematized with the figure of shipwreck. As Thomas Henry Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and other scientists disseminated their discoveries about the marine environment, however, its imagined unknowability and indestructability were put into question. Herman Melville documented the extractive enterprise of whaling; Philip Henry Gosse mourned tidepools ravaged by day trippers with a penchant for natural history. Writing about the tidal reaches of the River Thames, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew documented two-way traffic between land and water, human and ocean. A new understanding took shape that, in its depiction of the ocean as both affected by and affecting humanity, anticipates our own blue ecology.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.

This chapter addresses Pater’s vexed relationship with the decadent movement. It asks whether Pater is a decadent writer and considers the extent to which he illustrates, is appropriated into, and resists decadence. It is organised in three sections: (1) setting out the origins and definitions of decadence, with examples from mid-nineteenth century France; (2) explaining how Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) picked up on key features of French decadence and the ways in which the similarities were exploited by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons; (3) addressing how decadence figures in Pater’s later works as an ethical problem, with reference to Marius the Epicurean (1885).

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s short fiction, which took the form, to use Pater’s phrase, of ‘imaginary portraiture’. It positions these works in the context of Pater’s evolving imaginative writing, the publishing industry, and their influence on writers including Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. It illustrates how this concept of the imaginary portrait appears in works and titles of other contemporary authors published, like Pater, by Macmillan. It then explores the basis of Pater’s portrait stories, each of which focuses on an individual figure, usually a young male, destined for a tragic early death and set in Europe. In doing so, it provides examples from a range of works including ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ and ‘The Child in the House’.

In purely structural terms, Geoffrey Chaucer's poem Troilus and Criseyde erects a narrative edifice impressive for its classical austerity. Chaucer's main concern in Troilus and Criseyde is to demonstrate how deeply Trojan history is imbued with the 'Thebanness'. In Troilus and Criseyde, reading is a gender issue, and moreover, this chapter shows a question of the particular spaces where emotions are both gendered and engendered. The act of intimate reading produces exactly those powerful emotions that Pandarus had hoped to draw on previously when he was wooing Criseyde on behalf of Troilus. Pandarus's dismissive reaction would be a consequence of Criseyde's failure to read the courtly romance that he had hoped would facilitate his task. The act of reading is conceptualized as an act of intimacy, as an experience governed by and conducive to emotions.

This chapter discusses Geoffrey Chaucer's fictionalizing treatment of the different concepts of love in his Trojan romance of Troilus and Criseyde as a kind of counterdiscursive 'literarization'. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is one of the first texts in English that is extensively deliberating on the subject of love in the fictionalized 'novelistic' form of romance. The chapter looks at William Shakespeare's use of the matière de Troie as a highly allusive satirical Inns of Court play, radically extending the scope of 'love' to all its levels. In contrast to Chaucer's narrative 'love poem', Shakespeare's theatrical play on Troilus and Cressida has always radically puzzled literary scholars. Shakespeare 'literally'/'literarily' manages to perform the passions of love without committing himself to the one variety that temporarily looks as if it were, contingently, the right one.

Queer ecology studies addresses the desires and attractions that characterize relations among and eco-politics of humans and other organic elements of their environment. Scholarship in the field has predominantly addressed how the natural environment creates a space for people’s transgressions of normative erotic and sexual practices. In a bionetwork formulation, however, no pure nature can exist out there for humans or any other organisms because one is always a constituent element of an ecological web. Many Victorians addressed the issue of animal rights, including Francis Power Cobbe, Ouida, and Henry Salt. Some authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E. M. Forster evoked pastoral contexts for same-sex male intimacy while others such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad found adventure literature conducive to such considerations. This chapter, however, focuses on works by Walter Pater and William Sharp that address cross-species engagement as a form of aesthetic pleasure. Through philosophy and formal techniques, they engage biocentric notions of attraction and intimacy that destabilize anthropocentricism and the classificatory boundaries of the scientific and legal discourses that came to dominate the sexual and gendered landscapes.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s most famous work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, to provide an expansive context in which to understand its significance in intellectual, literary and art history. It begins by locating it: explaining the concept behind Pater’s collection of eleven essays in terms of publication history and the periodical press, and exploring the ways in which these essays combine silent citation with originality. Its sections concentrate on: (1) how and why Pater redefines the ‘renaissance’ from the ways in which it was conceived in the nineteenth century; (2) Pater’s definition of subjective aesthetic criticism, which reverses Matthew Arnold’s critical position, with particular attention to the Preface and Conclusion; (3) the centrality of desire and passion in text; (4) Pater’s subject-positioning between the ‘Old Masters’, modernity and his reader.

This chapter explores how members of Geological Society, including the 'Romantic scientist' Humphry Davy, mapped out geological regions as distinctive in the early nineteenth century. It considers how scientific and poetic descriptions of the mineral value and the aesthetic qualities of landscapes support the claims of Cornwall's Geological Society to regional difference and expertise. The chapter contributes to the strand of Romantic studies that has continued to develop a critique of the canonical, unified "centre" of English poets. It establishes a devolved plurality of Romanticisms, registering the complexities of national and regional contexts across the British Isles. Cornwall's geologists emphasise the distinctiveness of Cornwall through its ancient, sublime rocks and its exceptionally valuable minerals, in other words, over which they stake out claims of expertise and ownership. The preoccupation with rocks arose at least in part from growing interests in the aesthetics of rocky landscapes, along with the mining industry.