Footnote 3, Chapter 13, 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.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. [GPL]. "The Structure of Ruskin's Praeterita," in Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, ed. G. P. Landow (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), 87-l08. See also Avrom Fleishman, "Praeterita: Ruskin's Enclosed Garden," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 22 (1980), 547-558, which traces the topoi of the garden and the fall; and Jay Fellows, The Failing Distance: The Autobiographical Impulse in John Ruskin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 183-187. Fellows argues that Praeterita is a triumph over the "inefficacious" autobiography, since Ruskin distinguishes between himself and the younger self who is the object of the book; the book is his "own best exit from himself." This approach differs from my own, as will be apparent.
Last modified December 2000