This highly original and learned book is the first to study in detail Walter Pater's The Renaissance and examine the literary traditions to which it belongs: poetry, fiction, history, and criticism. Exploring Pater's neglected playfulness his uses of irony, paradox, and parody it traces with sparkling wit and elegance Pater's relations to poetry from Baudelaire to Ashbery; to fiction from Hugo and Flaubert to Virginia Woolf and Nabokov. Pater's role...