The extent of John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, though his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. In this volume, published to mark the centenary of Ruskin's death, a group of international scholars consider what is often an awkward and conflicted relation. Ruskin's voluminous writings are seen to shelter an incipient modernism whose antipathy to a degraded modernity, powerfully predicts a major current within the work of the new century.

This interdisciplinary collection of original essays reconsiders John Ruskin's legacy, suggesting that the vigour and vitality of his late work played an important role in shaping the twentieth-century mind. The contributors have focused on such diverse areas as Ruskin's thinking on music, his impact on social reform policies and the British Labour movement, his influence on scientific and artistic education, the complexities of his relationship with aestheticism, and on his writing in Fors Clavigera. Together, the essays expose the extraordinarily pervasive influence that Ruskin's work had on central cultural debates of the late Victorian era. Moreover, they overturn received assumptions about Ruskin's significance in the dawning of the modern sensibility.

In Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. Examining the works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist,)and William James (philosopher and psychologist), Feldman relates them to selected twentieth-century creations.