This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers
students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of
John Ruskin (1819-1900). The edition represents Ruskin's
extraordinary literary output, ranging from lectures, essays, and
treatises to reviews, correspondence, and critical notes. Ruskin
has been called 'the most powerful and original thinker of the
nineteenth century' and yet, like his two fellow Victorian Sages,
Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, his work remains obscure to
modern readers. This anthology hopes to remedy this situation by
presenting the immense range of Ruskin's interests, from art to
politics, museology to ornithology, architecture to geology, and
morals to economics-all of which interests were indivisible in his
view. Here are rapturous accounts of Turner, the Alps, Renaissance
painters, and Gothic architecture; but here, too, are urgently
dystopian analyses of the modern culture that we continue to
inhabit: vacuousness in communication, callousness in labour
relations, amoral sophistication in art, and rationalism in all its
various delusory forms in politics, society, and the economy. There
are special stresses on cultural preservation and the illusions
that it both fosters and depends upon; the status of women in
society, which Ruskin reflected on constantly; nature, wilderness,
and eco-catastrophism; and the role of artists like the
Pre-Raphaelites in a society mostly given over to Philistinism. In
short, the nineteenth century continues to cast an interrogatory
shadow over the twenty-first, and Ruskin is its most vital and
critical antagonist in the English language, inspiring
intellectuals as diverse as Tolstoy, Proust, and Gandhi during his
lifetime and afterwards. He was, this collection suggests, nothing
like a 'sage', but something much more important and much more like
those impossible things, a Victorian Renaissance man, an English
Rousseau, and a post-religious Jeremiah. Explanatory notes and
commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and
enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction
to the life and works of Ruskin, and a Chronology.
General
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