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Modernist Ruskin, Victorian Baudelaire: Revisioning Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rachel Teukolsky
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Abstract

John Ruskin's Modern Painters V (1860) and Charles Baudelaire's “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) are contemporaneous texts that both champion modern painters. Yet the two have rarely been considered together; while Ruskin's work is usually taken to represent a moralistic Victorianism, Baudelaire's essay is a foundational text of aesthetic modernism. This article compares the two texts in order to arrive at a more accurate, descriptive sense of nineteenth-century aesthetics, especially at the mid-century moment when “the modern” emerges as an aesthetic value in both England and France. Ruskin and Baudelaire are shown to propose surprisingly similar aesthetic theories, in part because they negotiate the same traumas of modernity, such as the derailment of religion and the commodification of the material world. Positioned on the ruins of Romanticism, each text intimates an idea of the modern that is not quite modernism but is, in fact, eminently Victorian.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 3 , May 2007 , pp. 711 - 727
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

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