‘Landscape for its own sake’: Walter Pater’s Ecology in “Sebastian van Storck”
Abstract
Questo saggio si propone di analizzare la rappresentazione in Walter Pater delle modalità di percepire la natura, il paesaggio e la loro interrelazione con l’umano, alla luce della teoria eco-critica e dell’estetica materialista. Il suo ritratto immaginario “Sebastian van Storck” offre lo spunto per indagare come in Pater il testuale sia in continuità con la vita, mettendo in discussione nozioni di dualità e differenza tra sistemi in conflitto. Più di altri protagonisti pateriani, Sebastian sperimenta una simbiosi con il suo ambiente. Il presente saggio si concentrerà in particolare sul suo rapporto con la terra nell’Olanda del XVII secolo, al fine di mettere in luce la radicale poetica ecologica iscritta nel ritratto di Pater.
DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-242
Parole chiave: Walter Pater, imaginary portrait, Holland, landscape, ecology.
Bibliografia
Bassi, Giovanni. 2017. “A little place in the neighbourhood of a great city”: Landscape and Environment in Walter Pater’s “The Child in the House”, “An English Poet” and “Emerald Uthwart”. Le Simplegadi, 15: 338-346.
Bassi, Shaul & Emma Mason. 2021. Introduction. Environmental Humanities and English Literary Studies: Facing the Crisis of Imagination. Textus, XXXIV: 7-14.
Bate, Jonathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology. Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London-New York: Routledge.
Bizzotto, Elisa. 2021. La mano e l’anima. Il ritratto immaginario fin de siècle. Milano: Cisalpino.
Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University.
Cave, Terence. 2022. Live Artefacts. Literature in a Cognitive Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Del Sapio Garbero, Maria. 2021. Pater, Sebastian e l’assoluto. M. Pennacchia, S. Corso & M. P. Guarducci eds. Eretiche ed Esteti. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 137-162.
Denisoff, Dennis. 2021. Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hext, Kate. 2013. Walter Pater. Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kerridge, Richard & Neil Sammels. 1998. Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature, London-New York: Zed Books.
Lambert-Chambonnier, Martine. 2004. Walter Pater et les «Portraits Imaginaires». Paris: L’Harmattan.
Matheus, Freya. 1991. The Ecological Self. London: Routledge.
Mentz, Steve. 2022. Blue Humanities. London-New York: Palgrave.
Mentz, Steve & Martha Elena Rojas. 2017. The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture. London-New York: Routledge.
Morgan, Benjamin. 2017. The Outward Mind. Materialist Aesthetic in Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mostert, Eric. 2020. Water and National Identity in the Netherlands; the History of an Idea. Water History, 12: 311-329.
Murphy, Trevor. 2004. After Rome: The Ends of the Worlds. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. The Empire in the Encyclopedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 165-193.
Østermark-Johansen, Lene. 2022. Walter Pater’s European Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Park, Simon. 2025. Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery. Oxford: Penguin.
Pater, Walter. 1873. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan.
Pater, Walter. 1910 [1886]. Sebastian van Storck. Imaginary Portraits. London: Macmillan & Co., 81-115.
Pater, Walter. 2002 [1893]. Plato and Platonism. Adelaide-London-Washington: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History 1855 [AD 77-79]. Trans. John Bostock and Henry Thomas Riley. Book XVI.1, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu (consulted on 08/08/2025).
Views: 52
Downloads: 23
