Product Description

'To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.' Ruskin was the most powerful and influential critic of the nineteenth century. He wrote about nature, art, architecture, politics, history, myth, and much besides; all his work is characterized by a clarity of vision as unsettling and intense now as it was for his first readers. This new selection draws on the whole range of his astonishingly varied output, from the passionate celebration of J. M. W. Turner's painting in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) to Praeterita (1885-9), the elegiac autobiography of his later years. The introduction outlines Ruskin's life and thought, and shows why he remains such a rewarding writer today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #382894 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author
Dinah Birch has published widely on nineteenth-century literature, and has edited George Eliot's Middlemarch for OWC. Her books on Ruskin include Ruskin's Myths (1988), Ruskin on Turner (1990), a selection from Ruskin's Fors Clavigera (2000), and edited collections of essays: uskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999), and Ruskin and Gender (2002) co-edited with Francis O'Gorman.

Customer Reviews

Adequate Introduction
I bought this book as a first foray into Ruskin and I think that it is perfectly suited to that, but perhaps not much else. The selection provides a reasonable spread of subjects that covers and gives an introduction to Ruskin's developing interests, but I found that these were a little too scant for my own reading. While this is always going to be the nature of a volume such as this, it is a useful gateway into reading Ruskin proper as it provides the reader with an adequate feel for the respective texts from which these selections have been culled. With this in mind, I have been able to pick up further books by Ruskin thanks to the information provided by this edition. My main reservation is with the notes as they tend towards superfluity in areas that I felt required little elucidation, whilst passing over others that could have been glossed.