2017 - Ruskin and His Critics
The Mikimoto Memorial Ruskin Lecture of 2017 was held on 16 November in Lancaster University's Cavendish Lecture Theatre.
Speaker: Dr Nicholas Shrimpton (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University)
Title: 'Ruskin and His Critics'
How was John Ruskin criticised? And how did he respond to criticism? Was he arrogantly indifferent or morbidly sensitive? With particular attention to his work in the 1850s (especially the last three volumes of Modern Painters and his Academy Notes), this lecture argues that response to opposition was a key feature of Ruskin's mode of discourse.
Nicholas Shrimpton is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University, where he was previously a Fellow & Tutor in English and Vice-Principal. His writing on Ruskin includes the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on his work (2002, 15th ed.), ‘Ruskin and the Aesthetes’ in Dinah Birch's (1999) Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, 'Ruskin and ‘War’' (Guild of St George, 2014) and his essays on ‘Italy’ and ‘Politics and Economics’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin (2015). At the time of this lecture, he was working on the new OWC edition of the poems of William Blake.
2017 - Ruskin and His Critics