John Ruskin

CONTENTS: Preface All Great Art Is Praise The Three Divisions of the Art of Painting First Exercise in Right Lines, the Quartering of St. George's Shield First Exercise in Curves. The Circle Of Elementary Form Of Elementary Organic Structure Of the Twelve Zodiacal Colors Of the Relation of Color to Outline Of Map Drawing Of Light and Shade

John Ruskin, Victorian England's greatest writer on art and literature, believed himself an adopted son of Venice, and his feelings for this city are exquisitely expressed in The Stones of Venice . This edition contains Ruskin's famous essay "The Nature of Gothic," a marvellously descriptive tour of Venice before its postwar restoration. As Ruskin wrote in 1851, "Thank God I am here, it is a Paradise of Cities."

John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, first published in 1865, stands as a classic nineteenth-century statement on the natures and duties of men and women. Although widely popular in its time, the work in its entirety has been out of print since the early twentieth century. This volume returns Sesame and Lilies to easy availability and reunites the two halves of the work: Of Kings’ Treasuries, in which Ruskin critiques Victorian manhood, and Of Queens’ Gardens, in which he counsels women to take their places as the moral guides of men and urges the parents of girls to educate them to this end. Feminist critics of the 1960s and 1970s regarded Of Queens’ Gardens as an exemplary expression of repressive Victorian ideas about femininity, and they paired it with John Stuart Mill’s more progressive Subjection of Women. This volume, by including the often ignored Of Kings’ Treasuries, offers readers full access to Ruskin’s complex and sometimes contradictory views on men and women. The accompanying essays place Sesame and Lilies within historical debates on men, women, culture, and the family. Elizabeth Helsinger examines the text as a meditation on the pleasures of reading, Seth Koven gives a wide-ranging account of how Victorians read Sesame and Lilies, and Jan Marsh situates the work within controversies over educational reform.

Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), Ruskin's serial 'Letters to the Workmen of Great Britain', is his most controversial and personal text. 'I neither wish to please, nor displease you; but to provoke you to think', Ruskin told his readers. Discursive, angry, and uncompromising, Fors is now seen as the most innovative and in many ways the most modern work of his later years. Interest in its extraordinary achievement has steadily expanded. Tim Hilton's biography identifies Fors Clavigera as 'Ruskin's masterpiece'. The lack of an accessible edition has obstructed the testing of Hilton's claim. This selected edition of Fors Clavigera is the first since the Library edition completed its 3-volume text (long out of print, and now often hard to find) in 1907. It provides an extensive and carefully chosen selection of the most challenging writing in Fors, including several complete letters and sequences. The densely allusive text is elucidated with full annotation, and the edition is provided with a critical introduction, bibliographical notes, and suggestions for further reading. Ruskin's original illustrations, essential for the understanding of his argument, are reproduced. This edition will at last make Fors Clavigera, disturbing and endlessly fascinating, available to modern readers.