Abstract

This study examines the place of Walter Pater as a historical thinker in the nineteenth century by situating him in the context of nineteenth-century historicism by reading him against such figures as Jacob Burckhardt, Jules Michelet, and Thomas Carlyle, as well as others; demonstrating the extent to which Pater raises and struggles with the questions and complexities of historical inquiry; showing how these questions manifest themselves in specific areas of Pater's thought, such as in his attention to the related discourses of biography and autobiography; and discussing these questions and solutions in terms of this century's latest response to the historical question in the "new historicism." ;This study is motivated by the assumption that nineteenth-century historicism takes as one of its most productive models the act of bodily exhumation. In sum, the physical act of unearthing and recovery is strikingly recapitulated and reshaped in the historical thought of the nineteenth century. Such a model and how it is manifested in historical discourse is a chief concern of this study, and is particularly germane to similar uses of the body in current critical theory and historical practice