Eric Warner, Graham Hough (Editors)
Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism, 1840-1910 - Volume I: Ruskin to Swinburne; Volume II: Pater to Arthur Symons.
Cambridge University Press, 2009. Two volumes. 9780521282901/9780521282918 xii/285/xii/303 pages.
Softcover volumes, each measuring approximately 6" x 9", are like new.
"This is a two-volume anthology of criticism of art and literature from approximately 1840 to 1910. The central purpose of the anthology is to show how Romantic ideas of art and imagination were transformed by a number of writers in the nineteenth century and became the fundamental premises of modernist aesthetics. 
Volume I begins with the development of the Romantic idea of the artist-critic as preacher in the work of Ruskin, whose aim was very much that of this Romantic forebears, Blake and Wordsworth: to awaken humanity to a greater spiritual perception. The volume also concerns itself with the transformation of this in works such as Arthur Hallam's essay on his friend Tennyson, which is central to the writing of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and with the development of French Romanticism into the influential aesthetic movement of Symbolism in the work of Gautier and Baudelaire. 
 The presiding genius of volume 2 is Pater, who was much influenced by Ruskin's belief in refining and educating the senses as a path to spiritual fulfilment. However, whereas Ruskin saw this education as a means of enriching the moral and religious life conceived in fundamentally orthodox terms, Pater regards religion as a supreme aesthetic experience with no particular connections either with morality or with any bourgeois virtues. Those who came under Pater's influence envinced disdain for the social order and its accepted values; this new tone is evident in the work of George Moore, Whistler and Wilde, all represented in this volume. The final author in this anthology, Arthur Symons, forms one of the principal links between nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetics, for it was his introduction of the French Symbolists to England, which was to give such a powerful impulse to the innovations of Eliot and Pound.
The volumes comprise general introductions and introduction to individual extracts, full annotation and helpful guides to further reading."