For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry.

This collection of essays stems from the conference 'Nineteenth-Century Literature and Aesthetics', which was held at the University of Milan in 2006 and organised by the editors of this volume. The interface between word and image covered in these essays embraces the fields of literature, architecture, painting, photography, music and art criticism. The authors stress the role of aesthetics in a number of contexts ranging from the early 1830s to the fin de siècle and beyond, as far as the last influences of Victorian taste on the early years of the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century the ancient interaction between literature and aesthetics was challenged and criticised by Martineau, Rossetti, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, Cameron and Carroll, among others: their awareness of the complexity of visual perception problematised the existing categories of realism, artistic conventions, discourse of description, translation and representation. The essays cover almost a century of debate between literature and aesthetics. They focus on the intersection of word and image by emphasising transgressions in art hierarchies, forms and languages, which restyle existing categories and project them into new aesthetic dimensions beyond the conventional idea of the sister arts.

English art critic John Ruskin was one of the great visionaries of his time, and his influential books and letters on the power of art challenged the foundations of Victorian life. He loved looking. Sometimes it informed the things he wrote, but often it provided access to the many topographical and cultural topics he explored—rocks, plants, birds, Turner, Venice, the Alps. In The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place, John Dixon Hunt focuses for the first time on what Ruskin drew, rather than wrote, offering a new perspective on Ruskin’s visual imagination. Through analysis of more than 150 drawings and sketches, many reproduced here, he shows how Ruskin’s art shaped his writings, his thoughts, and his sense of place.

Based on extensive fieldwork, and research into John Ruskin's still little-interpreted archival material, notebooks and drawings (in the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, UK and elsewhere), Stephen Kite offers an unprecedented account of the evolution of Ruskin's architectural thinking and observation in the context of Italy where his watching of building achieved its greatest intensity. Venice naturally figures large in a work that also examines other key sites including Verona, Lucca, Pisa, Florence, Milan and Monza; here, the fabrics are vividly read in their contexts against the rich evidence of Ruskin's diaries, his pocket-book sketches, architectural worksheets, drawings, and daguerrotypes (the early form of photography), and the drafts and published editions of the texts. Kite presents the complex story of Ruskin's visual thinking in architecture as a narrative of deepening interpretation and representation, focusing on the humbler monuments of Italy. He shows how Ruskin's early picturesque naturalism was transformed by the realisation that to understand the built realities confronting him in Italy demanded a closer engagement with the substance of the stones themselves; reflecting Ruskin's sense of his task as a near-archaeological gleaning and gathering of remains 'hidden in many a grass grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal'.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, the only works Thoreau conceived and brought to conclusion as books, bear a distinctively important relation to each other and to his Journal, the document whose twenty-four-year composition encompasses their development. In a brilliant new book, H. Daniel Peck shows how these three works engage one another dialectically and how all of them participate in a larger project of imagination. "Morning work," a phrase from Walden, is the name Peck gives to this larger project. by it he means the work done by memory and perception as they act to shape Thoreau's emerging vision of a harmonious universe. Peck argues that the changing balance of memory and perception in the three works defines the unique literary character of each of them. He offers a major reevaluation of Walden, which he sees neither as the epitome of Thoreau's career (the traditional view) nor as an anomaly (the recent, revisionary view). Rather, he sees Walden as a pivotal work, reflecting the issues of loss and remembrance that earlier had found prominent expression in A Week and prefiguring the late Journal's vision of natural order. Focusing on the two-million-word Journal, Peck provides the first critical analysis that defines the essential forces and the imaginative coherence in its vast discursiveness. The consideration of memory and perception in Thoreau also leads peck to the issue of the writer's modernity, and he explores the ways in which Thoreau anticipates twentieth-century thought, especially in the works of such great objectivist philosophers as William James and Alfred North Whitehead.

This book is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a literary critic and cultural historian, which examines and recovers a radical and still urgent challenge to the industrialisation of cultural tourism from the work of John Ruskin. Ruskin exerted a formative influence on the definition and development of cultural tourism which was probably as significant as that, for example, of his contemporary Thomas Cook. The book assesses Ruskin's overall influence on the development of national and international tourism in the context of pre-existing expectations about tourism flows and cultural capital and alongside parallel and intersecting trends of the time; examines Ruskin's contribution to the tourist agenda at all social levels; and discusses Ruskin's significance for current debates in tourism studies, especially questions of the place of the `canon' of traditional European cultural tourism in a post-modern tourist setting, and the various incarnations of `heritage tourism'. "As to be expected from Professors Hanley and Walton, this book offers a challenging examination of Ruskin's place in the history of British cultural tourism. However, it delivers far more than this; it brings a rich tapestry of historical experience to the understanding of contemporary European tourism. This rigorous and incisive critique of the role of Ruskin, the renowned 19th century polymath, is beautifully illustrated with pictorial and textual references; it is a must for scholars of tourism. It will also greatly benefit those whose studies include interpretation, leisure and outdoor education. It is written in a style which invites the reader to immerse themselves in a fascinating journey where new knowledge is unfolded in every chapter." Les Lumsdon, University of Central Lancashire, UK "Best known as a writer and art critic, this study makes a compelling case for the importance of Ruskin as a key figure in inspiring and shaping cultural tourism whether in Europe or in England for the serious minded of all social classes." Alastair Durie, University of Stirling, UK

A collection of Hunt's essays, many previously unpublished, dealing with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely".