Ruskin and Gender

Dinah Birch, Francis O'Gorman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780333968970
• eBook ISBN: 9780230522480
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens' Gardens from Sesame and Lilies was read as a locus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide-ranging revaluation of Ruskin's place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender - in the Victorian period, and in our own.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Textual Note
• Introduction
• 1 Manliness and the History of Ruskin in Love: Writing Ruskin’s Masculinity from W.G. Collingwood to Kate Millett
• 2 The Stones of Childhood: Ruskin’s ‘Lost Jewels’
• 3 The Foxglove and the Rose: Ruskin’s Involute of Childhood
• 4 Ruskin, Gautier, and the Feminization of Venice
• 5 The Feminist Origins of ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’
• 6 Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind’ (1988)
• 7 ‘What Teachers Do You Give Your Girls?’ Ruskin and Women’s Education
• 8 ‘Any Day That You’re a Good Boy’: Ruskin’s Patronage, Rossetti’s Expectations
• 9 Pantomime Truth and Gender Performance: John Ruskin on Theatre
• 10 Images of Proustian Inversion from Ruskin
• Selected Bibliography
• Index