Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater's aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae.

In addition to her superb analysis of the style and thought of Pater's individual writing, demonstrates that Pater was far more philosophically coherent and complex, and of far more interest for contemporary critical thought, than has previously been recognized. Her book is the best critical study on Pater yet written.

A convincing account of the unity of Pater's thought and probably the most detailed treatment ever attempted of the intricacies of his prose; a book that is likely to be an essential source for future readings of Pater.

Carolyn Williams is Chair and Professor of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is the author most recently of Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody.