Gaston De Latour is the first volume in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life.
Everywhere creating themes and resonances that span his narrative, the author's voice in Gaston de Latour is intensely personal; and the reader's experience is intimate, almost invasive. Although unfinished and first posthumously published in 1896, the novel was hailed by Richard Le Gallienne 'as sensitively beautiful as in his most perfect work, as rich in delicate colour and music, and as remarkable for exquisite detail.' This edition includes six additional suppressed chapters by Pater of varying degrees of completeness as a continuation of his interrupted originally-serialized text. This revised text (now a third longer than the posthumously published edition) appears here accompanied by a scholarly Introduction, Explanatory Annotation, and Apparatus Criticus. As it now stands, Pater's never-to-be-completed Gaston de Latour seems very much to belong to artistic modernism, like a 'conceptual' work of art-an idea not formally actualized but open to ranges of realization in the process of creation.
