Synopses & Reviews
Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the "long" eighteenth century. Landscape has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of eighteenth-century English culture; this book surveys those debates and offers a provocative new account. Mayhew shows that describing landscape was a religiously contested practice, and that different theological positions led differing authors to different descriptive approaches. Landscape description, then, shows English intellectual life still in the grips of a Christian and classical mentality in the "long" eighteenth-century.
About the Author
Robert J. Mayhew is a Lecturer in Historical Geography at Aberystwyth University, Wales.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements *
Part I: Historiography and Landscape Studies * Contextualising Landscape History * Landscape History: An Essay in Historiographical Method *
Part II: Landscape and Religion, 1660-1800: Preliminary Contexts * Diversity and Coherence in the Discourse of Landscape in the 'Long' Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Survey * Latitudinarianism and Landscape: Low Church Attitudes to Nature, 1660-1800 *
Part III: Samuel Johnson, High Churchmanship and Landscape * The Lexicon of Landscape: Johnson's
Dictionary and the Language of Natural Description * The Moral Landscape: Johnson's Doctrine of Landscape, 1738-59 * The Empirical Landscape: Johnson and the Factual Description of the Natural World, 1735-75 * Life, Literature and Landscape: The Role of the Natural World in Johnson's Biographies and Biography, 1739-84 * Conclusion: The Unfamiliar Prospect of Eighteenth Century Landscape Studies * Notes * Bibliography