Sociability and collaborative creativity: An approach to John Ruskin's early writing

Traditional Ruskin scholarship offers a distorted or incomplete understanding of John Ruskin's relationship with his father, John James, which has skewed accounts of his childhood experiences and creative process. This tradition is based on a paradigm of indoctrination, rebellion, and solitary creativity. This study offers a new approach for Ruskin studies regarding Ruskin's juvenilia, which instead emphasizes sympathetic connections, sociability, and collaborative creativity. Ruskin's childhood experiences, education, and early writings are better understood in terms of these larger constructs. This study surveys the development and evolution of sociability and sympathy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and identifies how these systems lend themselves to collaborative creativity. The study then examines the two traditions---the georgic and pastoral---that informed sociable creative production. Finally, it demonstrates how the convergence of these systems within the Herne Hill household shaped Ruskin's performance of authorship and textual production, specifically in the production of "Leoni: A Legend of Italy."...