Footnote 1, Chapter 4, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Gerald Bruns, "The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking," PMLA 90 (1975), 905. For Bruns, Ruskin's shift in interest from nature to culture between 1846 and 1851 mirrors the shift in his own thought from romantic art criticism to the "more typically Victorian habit of regarding art in relation to the period of its making." In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Bruns argues, history itself becomes a source of meaning: "any phenomenon that possesses history possesses on that account a power of signification which it is the business of the historian to actualize" (p. 915). Bruns does not discuss Ruskin's interest in memory and biblical history as it develops in Modern Painters II, a conception of time that I take to be still romantic in Bruns's terms.
Last modified December 2000