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Protecting Life from Language: John Ruskin’s Museum as Autobiography
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 32, Number 2, Spring 2009
- pp. 297-315
- 10.1353/bio.0.0088
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay argues that Ruskin’s Museum constitutes his first sustained attempt to represent his life story, and as such is a crucial precursor to his autobiography, Praeterita. The Museum project fails, but the failure is redemptive: it forces Ruskin to come to terms with the necessity of language for the presentation of memory, and in so doing helps make Praeterita possible.