"This book seems to give me eyes," wrote Charlotte Brontë of Ruskin's Modern Painters. Elizabeth Helsinger here explores the profound changes Ruskin induced in the way nineteenth-century viewers looked at nature and at art.

Helsinger argues that Ruskin transformed the artist- or poet-oriented aesthetics of romanticism into a beholder- or reader-oriented criticism. Combining critical attention to Ruskin's prose with her own wide-ranging scholarship, Helsinger places Ruskin's perceptual reforms within previously unexplored intellectual and cultural contexts. She connects his thought with Wordsworth's poetry, Turner's landscape art, and Carlyle's history, and shows the effect on his ideas of romantic literary and art criticism, associationist psychology, historicism, contemporary travel art and literature, and Victorian philology.

This illuminating study of Ruskin's criticism should be welcomed by students of nineteenth-century intellectual, literary, and art history.