Morally upsetting though some readers found The Renaissance, the book reached an appreciative audience. By the 1880s, Pater's criticism was well established among younger writers as exemplary of avant garde aesthetic attitudes. His historical novel Marius the Epicurean, set in Rome during the era of emperor Marcus Aurelius, was warmly received.

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Marius's personal journey--from the revival of old paganism, to the literary influence of his friend Flavian, followed by the consolations of Greek philosophy after Flavian's death, through Stoicism during his service in Aurelius's court, to the verge of conversion to the new religion, Christianity, before his death--is presented through an intricate web of narrative, essayistic passages, and translations and paraphrases from literary and philosophical works.

Marius's passionate friendships with the poet Flavian and with Cornelius, a Christian, weave a dimension into the book, which is often read as Pater's spiritual autobiography. Besides its poetic prose, the novel revealed subtleties of Pater's vision belied by the caricatures of his earlier work--including a close interest in the varieties of religious experience. Subsequent critics have seen in Marius a prototype of the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann.

Later Works

Pater continued writing fiction in this hybrid form--part short story, part essay, part memoir--after completing Marius. His Imaginary Portraits (1887) gathered fictional texts that drew on mythological and historical sources, developing personae that (as in the "imaginary portrait" of Marius) served in part as figures of psychological allegory.

And with Gaston de Latour, set in sixteenth-century France, Pater sought to extend Marius by projecting a trilogy of historical novels. The book, which remained uncompleted when Pater died in 1894, was published with the subtitle "An Unfinished Romance" in 1896.

The last volume Pater saw through the press, Plato and Platonism (1893), is now often regarded purely as prose poetry, though it was greeted respectfully by Plato scholars on its publication. Other papers reflecting Pater's serious interest in Hellenic culture were assembled in the posthumous Greek Studies (1895).

But it is primarily for his commentary on English literature that Pater's reputation as critic survives. The essays on diverse topics collected in Appreciations (1889) include writings on Shakespeare, Browne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, and Rossetti--as well as an essay on "Style" that serves as an important statement of Pater's aesthetic theory both as critic and as prose artist.

Conclusion

Running throughout Pater's work is a sustained engagement with the idea of culture as both a means and an end to life: The art object serves as a tool for increased enjoyment of our limited run of years, while the Bildung of the artist's own personality and creative powers can be exemplary for our conduct, like the lives of the saints for the faithful.

What his contemporaries took to be a shocking, even perverse license for self-indulgence, in fact was a doctrine that demanded a studious, even somewhat ascetic cultivation of the receptiveness to beauty.

And as Marius the Epicurean puts it, in the most characteristically Paterian way, this is "an art in some degree peculiar to each individual character; with the modifications, that is, due to its special constitution, and the peculiar circumstances of its growth, inasmuch as no one of us is 'like another, all in all.'"

A theory of art and an approach to living that influenced many European and American gay male and lesbian writers at the turn of the twentieth century, aestheticism stressed the independence of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

Renowned for his linear finesse and richly colored, meticulous paintings, Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli produced profound religious works, astute portraits, and poetic adaptations of classical mythology, all of which encourage a suggestively queer response.

Burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno has been seen as a martyr to religious intolerance; only recently has he also been recognized as a queer hero.

One of Germany's greatest twentieth-century authors, Thomas Mann encoded his own homosexuality in his novels but thought that homosexuality led to the destruction of social institutions and the death of the individual homosexual.

Although he has had various embodiments throughout history, Sebastian has long been known as the homosexual's saint.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

The art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the first German to have been publicly acknowledged as a homosexual, developed an aesthetic deeply rooted in his homosexuality.