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“Sinister Exile”: Dionysus and the Aesthetics of Race in Walter Pater and Vernon Lee
- Author(s):
- Dustin Friedman (see profile)
- Date:
- 2021
- Group(s):
- Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century English Literature, LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English, TC Philosophy and Literature, TC Sexuality Studies, TM Literary and Cultural Theory
- Subject(s):
- Aesthetics, Aesthetics--Philosophy, Race, Myth
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Kant, Aesthetic theory
- Permanent URL:
- https://doi.org/10.17613/deet-0639
- Abstract:
- 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.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 2 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
victorianstudies.63.4.03.pdf