The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to today's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

This volume offers an exciting new reading of John Ruskin's economic and social criticism, based on recent research into rhetoric in economics. Willie Henderson uses notions derived from literary criticism, the rhetorical turn in economics and more conventional approaches to historical economic texts to reevaluate Ruskins economic and social criticism. By identifying Ruskin's rhetoric, and by reading his work through that of Plato, Xenophon, and John Stuart Mill, Willie Henderson reveals how Ruskin manipulated a knowledge base. Moreover in analysis of the writings of William Smart, John Bates Clark and Alfred Marshall, the author shows that John Ruskin's influence on the cultural significance of economics and on notions of economic well-being has been considerable.

Ruskin's letters to Norton reflect and express, often more vividly than his own public prose, the spiritual, amatory, artistic, and cultural preoccupations of Ruskin's life. This 1987 volume presents a complete and accurate record of the exchanges, which comprise 333 from Ruskin to Norton and 63 in return.

John Ruskin (1819–1900), one of the leading literary, aesthetic and intellectual figures of the middle and late Victorian period, and a significant influence on writers from Tolstoy to Proust, has established his claim as a major writer of English prose. This collection of essays brings together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines to analyse his ideas in the context of his life and work. Topics include Ruskin's Europe, architecture, technology, autobiography, art, gender, and his rich influence even in the contemporary world. This is the first multi-authored expert collection to assess the totality of Ruskin's achievement and to open up the deep coherence of a troubled but dazzling mind. A chronology and guide to further reading contribute to the usefulness of the volume for students and scholars.

An authoritative work interspersed with nearly one hundred of John Ruskin’s Swiss drawings recounts his lifelong interest in Switzerland. Hayman provides a chronological account of Ruskin’s visits to Switzerland from his earliest travels in 1833 and 1835 and his frequent tours of the 1840s to the final visits in the 1880s. Of particular concern is Ruskin’s intention between approximately 1855 and 1865 to engrave his own drawings of Swiss towns for a work illustrative of Swiss history. Drawings of the historic Swiss towns in which Ruskin was most interested — Baden, Bellinzona, Brugg, Fribourg, Geneva, Laufenburg, Lucerne, Neuchâtel, Rheinfelden, Schaffhausen, and Thun — are introduced by excerpts from John Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland (1856). Hayman has traced a great many Swiss drawings Ruskin referred to in his letters and diaries and has located twenty-three previously unpublished ones which appear in his book. Ruskin’s well-documented defence of J.M.W. Turner is also brought to light as the author has juxtaposed reproductions of Turner’s sketches of Swiss towns with drawings by Ruskin. This work will not only interest scholars and students of Ruskin but should also pique the interest of Turner scholars.

John Ruskin and the Victorian Woman Writer addresses the little-considered personal and literary relationships of John Ruskin and four major Victorian women writers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti. Drawing on new archival, primary research, the book provides detailed biographical contexts for each of these relationships before considering the interplay of each woman’s writing with Ruskin’s. Focusing on literature, art, economics, and gender, it offers close readings of a selection of each woman’s oeuvre alongside Ruskin’s prose to demonstrate the affinities and the moments of disagreement between Ruskin and these writers. Though primarily aimed at an academic audience, the book will also be of interest to general readers with a developed interest in nineteenth-century culture. It advances readers’ understandings of the complex web of influence that existed between Ruskin and women writers in the 1850s and 1860s, establishing the opportunities that Ruskin’s art theory offered women writers engaged with social questions and the apparent influence of these writers on Ruskin’s own emerging political economy. By analysing women writers’ responses to Ruskin’s work—and his response to theirs—this book complicates and challenges assumptions about Ruskin’s supposedly troubled relationship with women.

Louisa Waterford (1818-91), modest, retiring, of good family, renowned for her beauty, and with extraordinary grace, was the embodiment of a Victorian ideal of womanhood. But like the age itself, her life was filled with contrasts and paradoxes. She had been born with artistic gifts, and became a satellite of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, though she had no formal training. Then, at the height of John Ruskin's intellectual power and success as a critic, she asked him to accept her as an art student, and he accepted. Their correspondence- often harshly critical, never, as Waterford put it, falsely praising - lies at the heart of this book. These are letters which open a spectrum of discussion on the cultural, gender and social issues of the period. Both Waterford and Ruskin engaged in tireless philanthropic work for diverse causes, crossing social boundaries with subtle determination, and both responded to a sense of duty as well as an artistic vocation. But, as Ings-Chambers shows, their correspondence was more than a dialogue about society: it helped to make Waterford the artist she became.