Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have sought to demonstrate how a life without constant growth might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sustainability has been largely forgotten. "Green Victorians" recovers the story of a small circle of men and women led by political economist and art critic John Ruskin. "Green Victorians" explores how Ruskin s most enthusiastic followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from painting, hand-weaving, and wood-working to gardening, archaeology, story-telling, and children s education. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for while those in Ruskin s experimental community established a thriving handicraft industry and protected the Lake District from over-development, they paid a price. Richly illustrated, "Green Victorians" breaks new ground by connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin s utopian community to the problems of ethical consumption then and now. "

"The poetry of Charles Tomlinson is distinguished by its respect for the world as objective fact - as set apart from human mythmaking, symbolizing, and egotistic projection. In Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition, Richard Swigg examines the amazingly versatile speech and relationship that Tomlinson has brought to the concreteness of nature and city from the early poems of the 1940s up to the late 1980s by assessing the achievement within an Anglo-American tradition of factuality from which Tomlinson has drawn strength and which his work now illuminates." "Blake's gleaming particularities, Constable's "science" of painting, Ruskin's visual energy, Emerson's and Wordsworth's delight in humble solidities, Whitman's celebration of American facts - all belong to the lineage that, as Tomlinson's poetry reveals, takes on new expression in the modernism of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. This book traces Tomlinson's debt to Stevens and Moore in his poetry of the 1950s, but gives special attention to the larger influence and widening of range that the art of William Carlos Williams exerted on the poetry of the 1960s and after. Williams's sense of the local as a way into the universal touches a theme that has special significance for Tomlinson's Englishness and internationalism, particularly in the way that this double quality gives us new insight into the poetry of other Englishmen (Ivor Gurney and D. H. Lawrence in relation to Whitman; Edward Thomas in relation to Robert Frost) who also sought New World precisions to speak their nativeness." "The volume's close attention to the vocal grain and texture of many individual poems is especially marked in a chapter devoted to Tomlinson's politico-historical poems on Danton, Charlotte Corday, and Machiavelli. The poet not only provides a perspective on T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz, but - in a poem about Trotsky's assassination - draws on the singular American quality of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane." "Swigg assesses Tomlinson's stature in post-war British poetry by contrasting his work with that of Philip Larkin and W. H. Auden and by demonstrating how much he shares with David Jones and Basil Bunting. The latter two, English internationalists of The Anathemata and Briggflatts, have, like Tomlinson, won their way home to a Britain of spiritual density and concreteness."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Philosophers, anthropologists, political thinkers and artists take a closer look at what the idea of beauty can mean to their disciplines, in an effort to redefine what beauty is and what it means to the design practice and art. The book focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century.