Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

1. Introduction: individualism and the 'aesthetic philosopher' -- 2. Empiricism and imperilled self -- 3. Subjectivity and imagination: from Hume to Kant via Berkeley -- 4. Metaphysics: Pater's failed attempt at atheism -- 5. Sense and sensuality: caught between Venus and Dionysus -- 6. Pater's Copernican revolution: the desiring, dying body -- 7. Evolution and the 'species': the individual in deep time -- 8. The moment and the aesthetic imagination -- 9. Ethics, society and the aesthetic individual -- 10. Conclusion: 'the elusive inscrutable mistakable self'

Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism, this study presents the first discussion of how Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses and in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. It also considers the dynamics between form and thought at the fin de siècle, contextualizing its comments in terms of Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and others, to offer a fully integrated account of the intellectual cultures and currents in this period.