Ruskin's culture wars

by Judith Stoddart

In Ruskin's Culture Wars, Judith Stoddart provides the first sustained modern critical reading of Fors Clavigera, placing this classic work in the context of its Victorian contemporaries: art journals, liberal and working-class periodicals, and popular criticism. In recreating the intellectual climate, she demonstrates the sense of cultural crisis and change evident at the time. Rebelling against the tendency to treat Ruskin's letters as the prose lyric of a damaged psyche, Stoddart shows how the cumulative text of Fors Clavigera not only records but revises and redirects the preoccupations of his period. He was an integral part of Victorian discussions of literary tradition and of the roles of democracy and nationality in late-nineteenth-century Europe.