Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2025

Walter Pater’s Embodied Knowledge: In and Out of Psychophysiology

Résumé

This chapter explores Walter Pater's complex and multifaceted relationship to different theories of the mind, from physiology to budding psychological theories. Pater drew on the discourses of British psychology in the 1860s and early 1870s, including Henry Maudsley and Spencer, to develop his particular psychology of aesthetics worked out in the relationship between subject and object in The Renaissance. Amidst the plurality of conceptions of subjectivity emerging from diverse fields such as psycho-physiology, psychology, psychopathology, and philosophy, Pater did not choose one but identified literary prose as the best field to formulate and express the operations of the psyche. In doing so he both contributed to the formation of the discipline of literary studies and to the formation of ideas about the operation of the embodied psyche. While grounded in the psychophysiological and evolutionary theories of the mid-century, Pater’s aesthetic criticism becomes a discipline that can work out theories of the psyche and subjectivity that are distinctive and at times ‘more accurate’ than existing ones. His literary approach to the questions of mind-body interaction that constitute the subject affords him an important place in late-nineteenth-century psychological conceptions because of the new perspective his concern with the aesthetic enabled him to bring to these questions.

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Dates et versions

hal-05561820 , version 1 (21-03-2026)

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Bénédicte Coste. Walter Pater’s Embodied Knowledge: In and Out of Psychophysiology. Atti Viragh and Marion Thain. Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature, Edinburgh University Press, pp.81-99, 2025, ⟨10.1515/9781399521291-007⟩. ⟨hal-05561820⟩
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