Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas is a novel-length imaginary portrait of a boy growing to young manhood in Italy in the second century, told from the view point of an erudite, humane, and psychologically astute nineteenth-century scholar and artist in prose very much like Walter Pater himself. The imaginary portrait is a literary genre that Pater developed. In all but one of his twelve imaginary portraits, most of them of short-story length, the character portrayed is a misfit in his environment, or, when his childhood is described, becomes a misfit after early childhood. The one exception is “The Child in the House”, in which the character is portrayed only in childhood. The environment which acts upon

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Published 12 July 2006

Citation: Inman, Billie Andrew. "Marius the Epicurean". The Literary Encyclopedia. 12 July 2006.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9863, accessed 9 February 2010.]