Synopses & Reviews
When I consider the quantity of wise talking which has passed inat one long ear of the world, and out at the other, without making the smallestimpression upon its mind, I am tempted for the rest of my life to try and do whatseems to me rational, silently; and to speak nomore.
--Ruskin in Fors Clavigera(27:353)
Ruskin did, however, speak voluminouslythroughout the late nineteenth century in opposition to the abstract theoreticalmusings of the day. His Fors Clavigera--a collection of monthly letters publishedover thirteen years--offered his readers a model of critical discourse as a living, material process.
In Ruskin's Culture Wars, JudithStoddart provides the first sustained modern critical reading of Fors Clavigera, placing this classic work in the context of its Victorian contemporaries: artjournals, liberal and working-class periodicals, and popular criticism. Inre-creating the intellectual climate, she demonstrates the sense of cultural crisisand change evident at the time.
Rebelling againstthe 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 butrevises and redirects the preoccupations of his period. He was an integral part ofVictorian discussions of literary tradition and of the roles of democracy andnationality in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Ruskin's Culture Wars offers avaluable case study in Victorian public discourse that contributes to ongoingdebates in our own century about the relations between language and history, textand context.