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"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.
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