Judith Stoddart – författare

This modern, critical reading of ""Fors Clavigera"" places this classic work in the context of its Victorian contemporaries, such as art journals and popular criticism. By recreating the intellectual climate, this work demonstrates the sense of cultural crisis and change evident at the time.

When I consider the quantity of wise talking which has passed in at one long ear of the world, and out at the other, without making the smallest impression upon its mind, I am tempted for the rest of my life to try and do what seems to me rational, silently; and to speak no more."" --Ruskin in Fors Clavigera (27:353)Ruskin did, however, speak voluminously throughout the late nineteenth century in opposition to the abstract theoretical musings of the day. His Fors Clavigera--a collection of monthly letters published over thirteen years--offered his readers a model of critical discourse as a living, material process.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.

This edited volume offers new models for engaging with the work of John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, architectural and educational theorist, amateur meteorologist and naturalist who gradually became an outspoken critic of capitalist economics and industrialization’s toll on the environment. Two hundred years after Ruskin’s birth, his relevance to art, literature, history, architecture, economics and natural science has not ebbed. However, the nature of Ruskin’s relevance has evolved considerably. This volume offers a cross-section of current scholarship, showing how a range of scholars continue to engage with Ruskin’s work in their research. The chapters provide a snapshot both of what scholars need from Ruskin now and how they continue to develop methodologies that allow them to keep in honest conversation with his writing – work that is wide-ranging, visionary and nuanced, but also elusive, promiscuously mixing the symbolic and scientific, and at times, deeply marred by the shortcomings of sexism, racism and rigid hierarchical thinking.