Before Queer Theory

Friedman, Dustin

doi:10.1353/book.67477

Cited by 21 publications

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“…As Dustin Friedman writes, Pater was part of an aesthetic network that "one might want to be queer, when being so provides the opportunity to be part of an emancipated artistic vanguard." 11 In this article, I take that instrumentality seriously by focusing on a milieu and moment in which the Paterian register was taken up as much for its social cachet as for its association with theories of art and culture. These speakers of Pater might be bad readers of him, in that they turned the 1873 Renaissance into a guidebook, but their repurposing arises from a real focus in Pater's writing: the connection between how individuals experience time in their life trajectories and how they experience history through inherited cultural resources available for their use.…”

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The School of Pater: Register, Reception, and the Gay Phase

Eisenberg¹

2023

Victorian Literature and Culture

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This essay argues that certain readers used Pater's work on an artistic period (the Renaissance) in order to periodize the phases of their own lives. Specifically, I suggest that they took up his “school of art” as a model for conditional group membership in a homoerotic culture. Throughout his career, Pater wrote about collectives who reinterpret the past—usually the Renaissance or Ancient Greece and Rome—in order to establish common orientations in the present. However, it is his school concept that comes closest to centering a group's self-conception in this mediation. Examining how Pater's reception realized this potential, I will make two claims. My conceptual claim is that a linguistic term, “register,” would strengthen how we study a particular function of group identity: style as a shared persona that can be put on and off in particular contexts. My historical claim is that a kind of Paterian register, in excess of Pater's personal style and occasionally in opposition to his intentions, enabled a particular sexual culture—the gay phase—at Eton and Oxford in subsequent generations.

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confidence: 99%