A survey of how Romantic ideas of art and imagination were transformed by nineteenth-century writers to become the fundamental premisses of modernist aesthetics.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Introduction; Walter Pater (1839-1894); 1. Diaphaneite; 2. From The Renaissance; 3. From 'The Child in the House'; 4. From Appreciations; 5. Prosper Merimee; James Whistler (1834-1903); George Moore (1852-1933); Oscar Wilde (1854-1900); William Butler Yeats (1865-1939); Arthur Symons (1865-1945); Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Notes; Guide to further reading.