Ruskin's Rage and Ours: The Dramatic Style

Abstract

Dramatic, even melodramatic, Ruskin's preferred style is often—and deliberately—given over to the passionate; in the middle of a lecture, he will stop to announce that he has found by his side a “violent little fragment of an undelivered lecture” (QA, 157) which he then delivers, subsequently pointing out his return to “cool English” (QA, 160). Such a self-conscious examination and description of his own mood and tone characterizes Ruskin's odd discursive stance, as he is at once involved and distant, choosing his drama in his written text, and then orally exposing it.