ABSTRACT
John Ruskin's evolving understanding of eighteenth-century literature was formed by the cultural politics of his own generation. Many of his first judgements were hostile, an aspect of the dismissal of an outmoded body of thought that seemed alien to his revisionary Christian aesthetics. His commendation of eighteenth-century literature helped to sustain the construction of a voice emerging from isolation and angry dissent. Ruskin's changing position reminds us that the Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics that he inherited have a long history. Ruskin's pivotal chapter on the pathetic fallacy, a term which he invented as part of his revisionary interpretation of landscape in the third volume of Modern Painters, focuses the terms of his argument. As Ruskin defines it, the pathetic fallacy, the transference of the poet's own emotions to the phenomena of nature, is never found in the greatest literature.
