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“Farewell farewell farewell”: John Ruskin’s Valedictory Gestures
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 4, Autumn 2013
- pp. 853-876
- 10.1353/sel.2013.0045
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay considers John Ruskin’s late lecture, “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts” (1868), in which the Victorian sage imagined he was giving up his career, in order to explore the central role played by scenes of leave-taking in his writings. Uniting a retrospective or elegiac gaze with a prospective or subjunctive finale, the valedictory speaker earns the authority of naming the character of his experience because it is something he may now leave behind. Ruskin’s valedictory gestures, focused in this lecture but stretching across his entire career, suggest that his obsession with failure also structured his understanding of professional authorship.