Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Modernity, subjectivity, liberalism, and nationalism
- 2 The symbol and the aesthetic sphere
- 3 Schiller's aesthetic state
- 4 Symbol, state, and Clerisy: the aesthetic politics of Coleridge
- 5 The best self and the private self: Matthew Arnold on culture and the state
- 6 Aesthetic kingship and queenship: Ruskin on the state and the home
- 7 The aesthetic and political spheres in contemporary theory: Adorno and Habermas
- Notes
- Index
6 - Aesthetic kingship and queenship: Ruskin on the state and the home
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Modernity, subjectivity, liberalism, and nationalism
- 2 The symbol and the aesthetic sphere
- 3 Schiller's aesthetic state
- 4 Symbol, state, and Clerisy: the aesthetic politics of Coleridge
- 5 The best self and the private self: Matthew Arnold on culture and the state
- 6 Aesthetic kingship and queenship: Ruskin on the state and the home
- 7 The aesthetic and political spheres in contemporary theory: Adorno and Habermas
- Notes
- Index
Summary
As a theorist of aesthetic statism, John Ruskin seems both very close to and very far from our twentieth-century worldview. In his sociological analyses of art in The Stones of Venice and his critiques of classical political economy in Unto this Last, Ruskin seems very contemporary, but in his embrace of medieval ideals of chivalry and domesticity he seems hopelessly retrograde. This is particularly a problem with Sesame and Lilies. One could try to solve the problem by writing off Sesame and Lilies as a flawed production of Ruskin's failing latter years. But Ruskin produced this work in the same decade as Unto this Last, and he himself argues that it emerges out of the same social vision as his critiques of political economy. For example, in his preface to the 1882 edition of Sesame and Lilies, he concludes by stating that “it was written while my energies were still unbroken and my temper unfretted; and that, if read in connection with Unto this Last, it contains the chief truths I have endeavoured through all my past life to display” (WR, XVIII, 52). Clearly, Sesame and Lilies held a high place for Ruskin as an expression of his mature thought.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism , pp. 92 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999