‘Landscape for its own sake’: Walter Pater’s Ecology in “Sebastian van Storck”

Abstract

This paper aims at analysing Walter Pater’s representation of modes of perceiving nature, landscape and their interrelation with the human, from the point of view of ecocritical theory and materialist aesthetics. His imaginary portrait “Sebastian van Storck” offers scope for investigating how in Pater textuality is in continuity with life, questioning notions of duality and difference between conflicting systems. More than other Paterian protagonists, Sebastian experiences symbiosis with his environment. This paper will specifically focus on his relation with the land in seventeenth-century Holland in order to unearth the radical poetics of ecology that Pater’s portrait embeds.

DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-242

Keywords: Walter Pater, imaginary portrait, Holland, landscape, ecology.

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