John Ruskin: Selected Writings

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 economicsDLall 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.

Author: Richard Lansdown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 10/31/2022
Pages: 528
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.42lbs
Size: 8.46h x 5.51w x 1.07d
ISBN13: 9780192868022
ISBN10: 0192868020
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 19th Century
- Art | History | Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945)

About the Author

Richard Lansdown, Professor, University of Groningen

Richard Lansdown is a graduate of University College London. He is the author of three books on Lord Byron, one with Cambridge, the other two with Oxford University Press, and numerous articles on nineteenth-century literature, from Austen to Ibsen and Hardy to Berlioz and Delacroix. A New Scene of Thought: Studies in Romantic Realism was published in 2016, and Literature and Truth: Imaginative Literature as a Medium for Ideas in 2018, following on from The Autonomy of Literature in 2001. He taught in Finland and Australia before moving to The Netherlands in 2017.