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Giovanni Cianci, Peter Nicholls (eds.)

Giovanni Cianci, Peter Nicholls (eds.) - Ruskin and Modernism - Copertina

Ruskin and Modernism

Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave 2001

Acknowledgements

The essays collected in this volume were first presented as papers at the conference on John Ruskin and Modernism held at the University of Milan in September 1997. The editors would like to thank the Rettore dell'Università and the Preside della Facoltà di Lettere for making the conference possible. Our thanks for additional financial support go also to the Istituto di Anglistica of the University of Milan, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, the British Council of Rome and Milan, Penguin Italia, Milan, the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of the University of Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, and the Fondazione della Cassa di Risparmio di Vercelli. We are grateful to the staff of the Istituto di Anglistica for their generous help with the organization of the conference, to Stefania Michelucci for her assistance with almost all aspects of the event, and to Toni Cerutti for providing superb hospitality at Vercelli. We are also grateful to Nerys Williams for her editorial contribution and to Tania Golds for assisting in the production of the final manuscript. A companion volume to the present work containing further essays drawn from the conference has been edited by Toni Cerutti and published as Ruskin and the Twentieth Century by Edizioni Mercurio, Vercelli.

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The Volume

The extent of John Ruskin's influence has long been acknowledged, though his impact on the development of Anglo-American modernism has received little systematic attention. In this volume, a group of international scholars consider what is often an awkward and conflicted relation. Ruskin's voluminous writings are seen to shelter an incipient modernism which powerfully predicts a major current within the work of the new century. Contributors explore this prefiguring from a variety of perspectives, considering, for example, Ruskin's relentless testing of the relation between aesthetics and ethics, his sense of history and myth, and his inquiries into architecture and the rise of the modern city. Unravelling Ruskin's connections with pre-modernists such as Pater and Worringer, and canonical modernist writers such as Pound, Ford, Eliot, Lewis and Lawrence, the essays show for the first time the curious mixture of denial and repetition, of dismissal and appropriation, which characterize Modernism's uneasy encounters with Ruskin's monumental legacy.

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Contents

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List of Contributors

Dinah Birch is Tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford. Her publications include Ruskin's Myths (1988) and Ruskin on Turner (1990). She has recently edited Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999), and her selected edition of Ruskin's Fors Clavigera will be published in 2000.

Laurel Brake is Senior Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, London. She is author of Subjugated Knowledges (1994) and Walter Pater (1994). Her edited volumes include (with Ian Small) Walter Pater in the Nineties and (with Bill Bell and David Finkelstein) Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identity (2000). She is currently completing a biography of Walter Pater.

Ronald Bush is Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at St John's College, Oxford. His books include The Genesis of Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' (1976) and T. S. Eliot: a Study of Character and Style (1984). In addition to his many essays on Modernist writers, he has also edited T. S. Eliot: the Modernist in History (1991) and Prehistories of the Future: the Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (1995).

Toni Cerutti is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli. Her books include Antonio Gallenga: an Italian Writer in Victorian England (1974) and Le vite dei vittoriani: Breve storia dell'autobiografia vittoriana (1981). She is the author of essays on Ruskin, Carlyle and Spenser, and has edited Da Blake al modernismo (1993) and Ruskin and the Twentieth Century (2000), companion to the present volume.

Giovanni Cianci is Professor of English at the University of Milan. He is author of La Scuola di Cambridge (1970) and La fortuna di Joyce in Italia (1974). He is the editor of numerous collections of essays, including Futurism/Vorticism (1979), Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura (1982), La Città (1991), and Il Cézanne degli Scrittori, dei Poeti e dei Filosofi (2000).

Ian Duncan is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott, Dickens (1992) and of essays on Victorian and Modernist writers. He has edited works by Conan Doyle, Scott, Buchan and Hudson.

Giovanni Leoni is Professor of the History of Architecture at the University of Bari. He is author of many works on Ruskin in Italian, and has translated and edited Ruskin, Opere (1987). In 1998, he edited the first complete Italian translation of Ruskin's Modern Painters.

Stefania Michelucci is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Milan. She is author of L'orizzonte mobile: Spazio e luoghi nella narrativa di D. H. Lawrence (1998) and of numerous essays on the travel writings and shorter fiction of Lawrence. Her edition of Lawrence's Twilight in ltaly and Other Essays was published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics in 1997. She is currently completing a book on the poetry of Thom Gunn.

Peter Nicholls is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Sussex. He is author of Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984), Modernisms: a Literary Guide (1995), and of numerous essays on twentieth-century literature and theory.

Andrea Pinotti is Lecturer in Aesthetics at the University of Milan. He is author of Il corpo dello stile: Storia dell'arte come storia dell'estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wöfflin (1998), Piccola storia della lontananza: Walter Benjamin storico della percezione (1999) and of essays on contemporary German art theory.

Max Saunders is Reader in English at King's College, London. He has published widely on early Modernist writers and is author of Ford Madox Ford: a Dual Life (1996) and editor of Ford Madox Ford: War Poems (1999).

Richard Stein is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. His published work includes The Ritual of Interpretation: the Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti and Pater (1975) and Victoria's Year: English Literature and Culture, 1837-1838 (1987). He is currently working on Victorian visuality.

Luisa Villa is Lecturer in English at the University of Genoa. She is author of books on Henry James (Esperienza e memoria, 1989), George Eliot (Riscrivendo il conflitto, 1994), and resentment in English fiction at the turn of the century (Figure del risentimento, 1997).

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