Theory and Criticism
Ruskin wrote over 250 works which started from art criticism and history, but expanded to cover topics ranging over science, geology, ornithology, literary criticism, the environmental effects of pollution, mythology, travel, political economy and social reform. After his death Ruskin's works were collected in the 39-volume "Library Edition", completed in 1912 by his friends Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. The range and quantity of Ruskin's writing, and its complex, allusive and associative method of expression, causes certain difficulties. In 1898, John A. Hobson observed that in attempting to summarise Ruskin's thought, and by extracting passages from across his work, "the spell of his eloquence is broken". Clive Wilmer has written, further, that "the anthologizing of short purple passages, removed from their intended contexts" is "something which Ruskin himself detested and which has bedevilled his reputation from the start". Nevertheless, some aspects of Ruskin's theory and criticism require further consideration.
Read more about this topic: John Ruskin
Famous quotes containing the words theory and/or criticism:
“There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.”
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)