Thesis ID: CBB001561664

“The law of help”: John Ruskin's Ecological Vision, 1843--1886 (2006)

unapi

Frost, Mark Andrew (Author)


University of Southampton (United Kingdom)


Publication Date: 2006
Physical Details: 244 pp.
Language: English

The impact of ecology on Ruskin's writings has been almost entirely neglected. Remedying this situation permits a much greater understanding of the totality of his work and of his contribution to a number of trends in nineteenth century culture to emerge. What guided Ruskin's attempts to understand and analyse the realms of art, architecture, nature, and society was a model of growth and creativity that was drawn specifically from an emerging nineteenth century ecological culture. In order to outline the nature of this model of creativity, it is necessary to show that it was manifested in his analyses of natural systems, but also that this model was extended to his accounts of artistic creation and social formation. Just as crucially, I will demonstrate that this model can be traced within his literary work, in texts such as Modern Painters (5 vols., 1843--60) which reflected ecological order through their approach to enquiry, and by their structure. Ruskin's texts often set up rigid, logical, and hierarchical systems of apparently objective investigation only to break them down in favour of enquiries that pursued connection, relation, mutuality, dynamic process, and proliferation. Such texts were not internally static, but engaged in a process of development. They did not produce stable or definitive positions, but continued to grow in response to the wider fields of intellectual activity in which they were situated. Ruskin was unable to treat subjects in isolation: his intersubjective practice was again a marker of an ecological mode of intellectual organisation. After examining a range of Ruskin's texts from the period up to 1860 in order to outline how this ecological model of creative organisation played out at textual and subjective levels, I show how Ruskin's studies of nature mark his extended participation in the emergent science of ecology, and that understanding this complicates any reading of Ruskin's relations with that other new Victorian science, evolutionary theory. In particular, it is possible to show that the belief that Ruskin's science rested on Enlightenment and religious models has been overstated. The simultaneous presence of these and of ecological models created an irresolvable tension in Ruskin's engagements with scientific culture, a tension that was manifested in the partial erasure of ecology from his later, mythopoetic botany. However, ecological models of enquiry were so deeply embedded in his approach to study that they re-emerged in near forms in later readings of nature such as Proserpina (1875--1886). Finally, I reassess Ruskin's relations with Darwinism, and to argue that his rejection of evolutionary theory arose only after the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). This insight clarifies the nature of Ruskin's attitude during the latter half of his career to ecology, gender, and religious issues, and suggests that it may be necessary to temper or modify recent positive readings of Ruskin's late science and position on gender.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. C 67/03 (2006): 840. UMI pub. no. C825409.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561664/

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Authors & Contributors
Anker, Peder Johan
Colwell, Mary
Sagarin, Rafe
Pauchard, Aníbal
Widgren, Mats
Whitney, Kristoffer Jon
Concepts
Ecology
Environmental sciences
Conservation biology
Fisheries; fishing
Discipline formation
Conservation of natural resources
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
21st century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Tatra Mountains (Slovakia and Poland)
Connecticut (U.S.)
Michigan (U.S.)
Indonesia
Institutions
Yellowstone National Park
Glacier National Park
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