Footnote 13, Chapter 6, 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]. For Helsinger the grotesque and ultimately the theory of allegory are extensions of excursive seeing (pp. 124-138). This interpretation is supported by Ruskin's reading of Dante and the diary entry of 1849, where nature bursts spontaneously upon Ruskin as a legible prophetic text. These episodes, I would argue, correspond to the shift in his self-presentation, from an inspired Evangelist and interpreter to a representative modern man in "The Moral of Landscape."
Last modified December 2000