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.

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens' Gardens from Sesame and Lilies was read as a locus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide-ranging revaluation of Ruskin's place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender - in the Victorian period, and in our own.

This title was first published in 2001. Ruskin said that 1860 marked the beginning of his 'proper work'. This study presents new, historicized readings of important texts and themes from that late period, 1860-1889, discussing in detail works including Unto this Last (1860), the Lectures on Art (1870), Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), and The Bible of Amiens (1880-85), and considering key themes such as Ruskin's politicized regard for Pre-Raphaelitism in the 1870s, and the complex topic of Ruskin and manliness. Claiming new and distinctive importance for this period of Ruskin's work, both in terms of Ruskin's development as a writer and his place in Victorian culture as it moved toward modernity, this book is the first solely devoted to the prolific later years, and draws on much unpublished material.

John Ruskin was one of the greatest Victorian critics of art and society, but he was also preoccupied with politics, economics and education. This pocket-sized biography explores his influence on his own age and ours, examining his work, his relationships and his creative life.

Draws together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines to analyse the life and work of John Ruskin (1819-1900).

This book offers new perspectives on the origins and development of John Ruskin’s political thought. Graham A. MacDonald traces the influence of late medieval and pre-Enlightenment thought in Ruskin’s writing, reintroducing readers to Ruskin’s politics as shaped through his engagement with concepts of natural law, legal rights, labour and welfare organization. From Ruskin’s youthful studies of geology and chemistry to his back-to-the-land project, the Guild of St. George, he emerges as a complex political thinker, a reformer—and what we would recognize today as an environmentalist. John Ruskin’s Politics and Natural Law is a nuanced reappraisal of neglected areas of Ruskin’s thought.

This important work in Ruskin studies provides for the first time an authoritative study of Ruskin’s Guild of St George. It introduces new material that is important in its own right as a significant piece of social history, and as a means to re-examine Ruskin’s Guild idea of self-sufficient, co-operative agrarian communities founded on principles of artisanal (non-mechanised) labour, creativity and environmental sustainability. The remarkable story of William Graham and other Companions lost to Guild history provides a means to fundamentally transform our understanding of Ruskin’s utopianism.