SOURCE: “Seeing and Hearing in Marius the Epicurean,” in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 37, No. 2, September, 1982, pp. 188-206.

In the following essay, Bump describes how Pater uses aural imagery and performatives in Marius the Epicurean to lead Marius to “the music of Logos” and “a fuller sense of human communication.”

It would be difficult to overestimate just how pervasive are the spatial paradigms of literature we have inherited from Pater. Sharon Bassett points out that Pater was an important precursor of Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, and the American deconstructionists, and demonstrates that the source of Pater's influence on modern literary criticism was his anticipation of what Joseph Frank calls “spatiality”: “When, in 1945, Joseph Frank endeavors to articulate those specific qualities that belong to modern literature he unerringly focuses on features that a half century earlier Pater had associated with what he hoped would be the modern critical...