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The Moral Intuition of Ruskin's "Storm-Cloud"
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 45, Number 4, Autumn 2005
- pp. 917-933
- 10.1353/sel.2005.0036
- Article
- Additional Information
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Whereas the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature argue that John Ruskin's 1884 lecture "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century" presents an environmental argument, this paper argues that the work is fundamentally ecological and moral: ecological in its emphasis on the interrelatedness of the divine, natural, and human economies; moral in its emphasis on how the external pollution that environs Ruskin's audience reflects an internal pollution at the heart of Victorian society, and in its argument that nature polluted by human economic activities signifies humankind's alienation from both God and nature.