Ruskin After 200 Thinking with Ruskin in the Twenty-First Century

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.

Introduction.- SECTION ONE. RUSKIN’S PROJECTS AT 200.- 1. Ruskin’s Guild of St George, Yesterday and To-Day.- 2. The Brantwood Parables.- SECTION TWO. RUSKIN’S REACH.- 3. Ruskin, Wordsworth, Stevens, and the Pathetic Fallacy.- 4. “Him that shoots at beauty”: Thoreau on the Wings of Ruskin.- 5. Ruskin for Whitechapel.- SECTION THREE. RUSKIN AND THE ART OF TECHNOLOGY.- 6. Art and Industry: John Ruskin, George Lance, and Still-Life Painting.- 7. “Science Mixed with Feeling”: Ruskin and the Observation and Representation of the Natural World.- 8. Ruskin’s Media: Technologies of the Gothic.- 9. Ruskin’s Rubbish.- SECTION FOUR. RUSKIN, PROPHET OF THE ANTHROPOCENE.- 10. Thinking Ecologically with Ruskin and Dickens.- 11. Ruskin, Slavery, and Zombie History.- 12. Are Carbon Taxes Impious?.- 13. Ruskin in the Age of COVID-19.

Sara L. Maurer is Associate Professor Emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame, USA.

Judith Stoddart is Vice Provost for University Arts and Collections and Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA.

Deanna K. Kreisel is Associate Professor of English and co-director of Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi, USA. 

Amy Woodson-Boulton is Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University, USA.