Ruskin's Culture Wars

Description

Kritische analyse van de serie brieven Fors Clavigera van kunstenaar, leraar en medeoprichter van de Art & Crafts Society John Ruskin (Londen 08-02-1819, Brantwood 20-01-1900) waarin hij zijn opvattingen over mens, cultuur en maatschappij zijn verwoord. - In Ruskin's Culture Wars, Judith Stoddart provides the first sustained modern critical reading of Fors Clavigera, placing this classic work in the context of its Victorian contemporaries: art journals, liberal and working-class periodicals, and popular criticism. In re-creating the intellectual climate, she demonstrates the sense of cultural crisis and change evident at the time. Rebelling against the tendency to treat Ruskin's letters as the prose lyric of a damaged psyche, Stoddart shows how the cumulative text of Fors Clavigera not only records but revises and redirects the preoccupations of his period. He was an integral part of Victorian discussions of literary tradition and of the roles of democracy and nationality in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Ruskin's Culture Wars offers a valuable case study in Victorian public discourse that contributes to ongoing debates in our own century about the relations between language and history, text and context