Kate Hext
Biographic Data
| ID | 6625199 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kate Hext |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kate |
| FAMILY NAME | Hext |
| SIGNATURE | HEXT K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0870-4515 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Pater
This is the first and only comprehensive introductory study of Walter Pater, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and philosopher. One of the late nineteenth century's most important and least understood writers, Pater evinced a new mode of hedonism that presented a fundamental challenge to the prevailing moral and social norms of his contemporaries, responding to post-Darwinian sensibility, waning faith, and new philosophies in ethics …
The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde
The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde puts Wilde the Icon into an expansive literary and dramatic context. Its thirty-six contributors offer a readable guide to Wilde studies for the early twenty-first century. Its chapters reflect Wilde’s status as a queer writer while filling in the gaps that this focus has left and looking forward to the next generation of critical studies on Wilde. It is a volume designed for readers ranging from students and th…
Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde
“Tired Hedonists” in Los Angeles
This article focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel The Last Tycoon . It illustrates how the novel advances the tropes of the decadent movement as an ironic way to evoke Hollywood and, at its centre, the fictional movie mogul Monroe Stahr. In so doing, I situate the novel and its author in the context of American engagements with decadence in the early twentieth century, and show how Fitzgerald creates a distinctly modern America…
Chaplin's Eyes
Charlie Chaplin's eyes were blue but no one remembers that.For moviegoers since the 1910s, they have been dark and deep, lined in black wax, and captured by a black-and-white movie camera.Chaplin's eyes are not merely striking; they defined cinema and the modern subject.In an emerging culture of movie voyeurs they created a new grammar of looking, one brought into being by cinema's technological developments between the transition period of the m…
English Literature After #MeToo
This introductory essay sets out the relationship between #MeToo movement and higher education in a global context, arguing that teaching in universities is defined by what we term “Post‐#MeToo Consciousness.” The essay explores the implications of this for teaching practice and the principles of English literary studies, opening questions about how it tacitly reshapes the discipline (vis authority, the canon, scholarly language), and asking how …
Victorians in the Closet
This essay offers a new perspective on the Victorians’ representation in early cinema. It argues that the profile of Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement was such, in early twentieth-century America, that its movies often viewed the Victorians through a decadent lens. Situating its discussion in a detailed exposition of Hollywood's interest in late-Victorian decadence, this essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between Oscar Wilde's imagin…
Decadence in the Age of Modernism
Dainty malice: Ada Leverson and post-Victorian decadent feminism / Kristin Mahoney -- The ugly things of Salome / Ellen Crowell -- Decadent paths and percolations after 1895 / Nick Freeman -- "A poetess of no mean order": Margaret Sackville, women's poetry, and the legacy of aestheticism / Joseph Bristow -- The queer drift of Firbank / Ellis Hanson -- Burning the candle at both ends: Edna St. Vincent Millay's decadence / Sarah Parker -- Woolf and…
Ben Hecht's Hard-Boiled Decadence
This essay illustrates how Ben Hecht's short stories in The Little Review and the Chicago Daily News crucially expand the scope of burgeoning research into post-Wildean, American Decadence. These works (written between 1915 and 1921) have been over-shadowed by Hecht's later Hollywood career to the point where they have all-but eluded scholarly commentary. However, attention to these vignettes of sensual experience in downtown Chicago reveals that…
Burning with a ‘hard, gem-like flame’
This chapter spans Oscar Wilde’s career in order to consider how he uses Heraclitus’ philosophy of flux to underpin his conception of the pleasure-seeking, hedonistic individual. By the late 1870s, when Wilde arrived at Oxford, Heraclitus had acquired a new significance through Benjamin Jowett’s reforms to the Literæ Humaniores syllabus and the work Wilde famously referred to as ‘my golden book’, Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renai…
Metaphysics
This chapter revises the oft-perpetuated view that Pater rejected God and metaphysics in his early writings. It argues that he is never able to commit himself to the materialist view he entertains in Conclusion to The Renaissance. It focuses on how Pater uses light as a metaphor in ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864) and ‘Winckelmann’ (1867, 1873) to represent the animating and individuating quality in each individual. It suggests that whilst light begins as a …
Walter Pater
This title explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies.
Literary Form and Philosophical Thought in Nineteenth‐Century Britain
This introduction to the special issue on Philosophy and Literature in Nineteenth‐Century Britain intends to define the fundamental historical and theoretical contexts of the volume. There are three main parts to this contextualization. First, and most substantially, I explore the interests and evolution of philosophical ideas in nineteenth‐century Britain. Whilst giving an overview of the trends and movements in the period, I argue that literatu…
Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche: “Rebels in the Name of Beauty” ’ reconsiders the intellectual confluence of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is unlikely that Wilde and Nietzsche knew of each other. Yet, similarities between their conceptions of truth, aesthetic experience, individualism, and ethics, as well as their highly evocative, aphoristic styles, have drawn a large number of critics – from Thomas Mann to Patrick Bridgwater and …
Second Sight
Journal Article Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature Get access Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature, by Catherine Maxwell, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, vii + 260 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7190-7144-7 Kate Hext Kate Hext 1University of Exeter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 16, Is…
Recent Scholarship on Walter Pater
This essay traces the principal currents in Walter Pater scholarship from the early 1990s to its present and future directions. It is organized into a discussion of three broad critical trends which, in this period, have redefined the field: queer studies, interdisciplinary studies and comparative literary relations. Through the discussion of these interlinking approaches I will argue that recent critical modes offer a rich new language with whic…
Multiculturalism after 7/7
Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche: “Rebels in the Name of Beauty” ’ reconsiders the intellectual confluence of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is unlikely that Wilde and Nietzsche knew of each other. Yet, similarities between their conceptions of truth, aesthetic experience, individualism, and ethics, as well as their highly evocative, aphoristic styles, have drawn a large number of critics – from Thomas Mann to Patrick Bridgwater and …
Multiculturalism after 7/7
Recent Scholarship on Walter Pater
This essay traces the principal currents in Walter Pater scholarship from the early 1990s to its present and future directions. It is organized into a discussion of three broad critical trends which, in this period, have redefined the field: queer studies, interdisciplinary studies and comparative literary relations. Through the discussion of these interlinking approaches I will argue that recent critical modes offer a rich new language with whic…
Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche: “Rebels in the Name of Beauty” ’ reconsiders the intellectual confluence of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is unlikely that Wilde and Nietzsche knew of each other. Yet, similarities between their conceptions of truth, aesthetic experience, individualism, and ethics, as well as their highly evocative, aphoristic styles, have drawn a large number of critics – from Thomas Mann to Patrick Bridgwater and …
Second Sight
Journal Article Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature Get access Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature, by Catherine Maxwell, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, vii + 260 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7190-7144-7 Kate Hext Kate Hext 1University of Exeter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 16, Is…
Literary Form and Philosophical Thought in Nineteenth‐Century Britain
This introduction to the special issue on Philosophy and Literature in Nineteenth‐Century Britain intends to define the fundamental historical and theoretical contexts of the volume. There are three main parts to this contextualization. First, and most substantially, I explore the interests and evolution of philosophical ideas in nineteenth‐century Britain. Whilst giving an overview of the trends and movements in the period, I argue that literatu…
Metaphysics
This chapter revises the oft-perpetuated view that Pater rejected God and metaphysics in his early writings. It argues that he is never able to commit himself to the materialist view he entertains in Conclusion to The Renaissance. It focuses on how Pater uses light as a metaphor in ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864) and ‘Winckelmann’ (1867, 1873) to represent the animating and individuating quality in each individual. It suggests that whilst light begins as a …
Walter Pater
This title explores how Walter Pater and his contemporary aesthetes were influenced by modern philosophies.
Burning with a ‘hard, gem-like flame’
This chapter spans Oscar Wilde’s career in order to consider how he uses Heraclitus’ philosophy of flux to underpin his conception of the pleasure-seeking, hedonistic individual. By the late 1870s, when Wilde arrived at Oxford, Heraclitus had acquired a new significance through Benjamin Jowett’s reforms to the Literæ Humaniores syllabus and the work Wilde famously referred to as ‘my golden book’, Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renai…
Ben Hecht's Hard-Boiled Decadence
This essay illustrates how Ben Hecht's short stories in The Little Review and the Chicago Daily News crucially expand the scope of burgeoning research into post-Wildean, American Decadence. These works (written between 1915 and 1921) have been over-shadowed by Hecht's later Hollywood career to the point where they have all-but eluded scholarly commentary. However, attention to these vignettes of sensual experience in downtown Chicago reveals that…
Decadence in the Age of Modernism
Dainty malice: Ada Leverson and post-Victorian decadent feminism / Kristin Mahoney -- The ugly things of Salome / Ellen Crowell -- Decadent paths and percolations after 1895 / Nick Freeman -- "A poetess of no mean order": Margaret Sackville, women's poetry, and the legacy of aestheticism / Joseph Bristow -- The queer drift of Firbank / Ellis Hanson -- Burning the candle at both ends: Edna St. Vincent Millay's decadence / Sarah Parker -- Woolf and…
Victorians in the Closet
This essay offers a new perspective on the Victorians’ representation in early cinema. It argues that the profile of Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement was such, in early twentieth-century America, that its movies often viewed the Victorians through a decadent lens. Situating its discussion in a detailed exposition of Hollywood's interest in late-Victorian decadence, this essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between Oscar Wilde's imagin…
The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde
The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde puts Wilde the Icon into an expansive literary and dramatic context. Its thirty-six contributors offer a readable guide to Wilde studies for the early twenty-first century. Its chapters reflect Wilde’s status as a queer writer while filling in the gaps that this focus has left and looking forward to the next generation of critical studies on Wilde. It is a volume designed for readers ranging from students and th…
Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde
“Tired Hedonists” in Los Angeles
This article focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel The Last Tycoon . It illustrates how the novel advances the tropes of the decadent movement as an ironic way to evoke Hollywood and, at its centre, the fictional movie mogul Monroe Stahr. In so doing, I situate the novel and its author in the context of American engagements with decadence in the early twentieth century, and show how Fitzgerald creates a distinctly modern America…
Chaplin's Eyes
Charlie Chaplin's eyes were blue but no one remembers that.For moviegoers since the 1910s, they have been dark and deep, lined in black wax, and captured by a black-and-white movie camera.Chaplin's eyes are not merely striking; they defined cinema and the modern subject.In an emerging culture of movie voyeurs they created a new grammar of looking, one brought into being by cinema's technological developments between the transition period of the m…
English Literature After #MeToo
This introductory essay sets out the relationship between #MeToo movement and higher education in a global context, arguing that teaching in universities is defined by what we term “Post‐#MeToo Consciousness.” The essay explores the implications of this for teaching practice and the principles of English literary studies, opening questions about how it tacitly reshapes the discipline (vis authority, the canon, scholarly language), and asking how …
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Pater
This is the first and only comprehensive introductory study of Walter Pater, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and philosopher. One of the late nineteenth century's most important and least understood writers, Pater evinced a new mode of hedonism that presented a fundamental challenge to the prevailing moral and social norms of his contemporaries, responding to post-Darwinian sensibility, waning faith, and new philosophies in ethics …
Art (11 works) · Literature (8 works) · Art history (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · History (5 works) · Decadence (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · History (4 works) · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)