A new form for a new crisis: the emergence of the novel-essay and the case of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean

Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) apparently defies categorisation. Although set in Antonine Rome, it is full of modern references, and though it traces the development of a single character, it is not a Bildungsroman. This essay interprets the novel as a hybrid genre, the “novel- essay”, which surfaced in the late 19th century. Following Stefano Ercolino, I argue that the novel- essay emerged as an aesthetic response “to the increasing pressure of historical time in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (…) an epoch in which one witnessed not only the greatest economic expansion and cultural development of the modern era, but also the first huge modern economic crisis” (Ercolino 2014, xvii). The novel-essay challenges the equation between scientific and technological advancement, on the one side, and spiritual human progress on the other and, unlike Victorian novels with linear plots, it disrupts narrative flow with essayistic digressions that offer ideological critique, what Ercolino calls a “morphological exorcism of the pressure of historical time” (41). I contend that Pater’s novel exemplifies this form. As Giles Whiteley notes, Pater “invites his readers to see Marius through a double lens, both as a historical novel and as one commenting on contemporary concerns” (Whiteley 2020, 159), which I interpret as linked to the faltering of philosophical certainties during the turn of the century. My objective is to shed a light on Pater’s work as a novelist, examine his role in the disruption of literary conventions and trace this disruption back to the process of progressive technological and scientific acceleration that characterised the long fin de siècle.