The landscape within: the aesthetic renegotiatons of a changing environment in Ruskin, Lee, Stephens, and Woolf

The object of my proposed paper is that of investigating the ways in which the aesthetic glance has come to terms with the transformed relationship between human and non-human beginning from the mid nineteenth century and culminating in the early twentieth century. In particular, four essays will be surveyed: John Ruskin’s “On the Novelty of Landscapes” (1856), Vernon Lee’s The Beautiful (1913), Frederic George Stephens “Modern Giants” (1850), and Virginia Woolf’s “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car” (posthumously published in 1942). These texts are taken as examples to demonstrate how the transformations of the surrounding environment are internalised in the secularised body, which thus becomes a suitable site to store and register excitement or anxiety in the long fin de siècle. Furthermore, it will be argued that by challenging, according to Adorno, “the ideal of clara et distincta perception and indubitable certainty”, the aesthetic essay genre is a crucial component in such a process. Indeed, it simultaneously allows for the enactment of the uncertainty induced by the changing environment and for the recourse to art essay to proclaim a regenerative and spiritual refreshment through beauty to combat that same feeling of uncertainty. Finally, my paper will suggest that the concern for the beneficial effects of art as presented by these essays can help us better assess our current critical interest in theorising the role of literature in the present planetary condition. If, as Kerridge (2014) suggests, one ought to ask “how good is this novel, poem, play or work of non-fiction from the viewpoint of environmental priorities?” when evaluating a text, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the connection between art and environmental surroundings is a preoccupation already manifest in the art critics of Victorian and Edwardian times.