Landscape and Englishness

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401203601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley’s travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr’s photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude’s travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence’s travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie’s writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.

Landscape and Englishness

Author: David Matless
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861890979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material - topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural, progressive and preservationist, took shape around debates over building in the countryside, the replanning of cities, and the cultures of leisure and citizenship. He concludes by tracing out the story of landscape and Englishness down to the present day, showing how the familiar terms of debate regarding landscape and heritage are a product of the immediate post-war era, and asking how current arguments over care for the environment or expressions of the nation resonate with earlier histories and geographies. " ... cultural history at its best, subtle, multi-layered and full of new ideas and insights ... this book is a 'must'."—Contemporary British History " ... creates a convincing portrait of the changing meanings of the English landscape in the twentieth century."—Times Literary Supplement

Storied Ground

Author: Paul Readman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108424732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
The relationship between landscape and identity is explored to reveal how Englishness encompasses the urban and rural, and the north and south.

An Imaginary England

Author: Roger Ebbatson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351958852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
In his highly theorised and original book, Roger Ebbatson traces the emergence of conceptions of England and Englishness from 1840 to 1920. His study concentrates on poetry and fiction by authors such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, Q, Rupert Brooke and D.H. Lawrence, reading them as a body of work through which a series of problematic English identities are imaginatively constructed. Of particular concern is the way literary landscapes serve as signs not only of identity but also of difference. Ebbatson demonstrates how a sense of cultural rootedness is contested during the period by the experiences of those on the societal margins, whether sexual, national, social or racial, resulting in a feeling of homelessness even in the most self-consciously 'English' texts. In the face of gradual imperial and industrial decline, Ebbatson argues, foreign and colonial cultures played a crucial role in transforming Englishness from a stable body of values and experiences into a much more ambiguous concept in continuous conflict with factors on the geographical or psychological 'periphery'.

Landscape, Race and Memory

Author: Dr Divya P Tolia-Kelly
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409488632
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
Memory is seldom explored through the experience of geographically mobile, racialized populations. Whilst the relationships between the political value of landscape and national memory have previously been written through, there has been little mention of postcolonial, 'diasporic' racialized citizens. Using both visual and material culture, this book examines the value of 'landscape and memory' for postcolonial migrants living in Britain. It uses memory to examine how postcolonial citizenship in Britain is experienced - through remembered citizenships of 'other' geographies abroad. By reflecting on the cultural landscapes of British Asian women, the book reveals social-historical narratives about migration, citizenship and belonging. New spaces of memory are presented as mobile and as politically charged with meaning as the more formal spaces of memorialization. The book offers a refiguring of race memory as being critical to English heritage and postcolonial politics and makes an important contribution to the writings on memory, race and landscape.

Almost Home

Author: Kristine F. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813933658
Category : Gardens, English
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Preface and acknowledgements -- Introduction -- King Edward VII Sanatorium -- Phillips Memorial Cloister -- World War I cemeteries : naturalizing death -- Gézaincourt Communal Cemetery Extension -- Trouville Hospital -- Warlincourt Halte British Cemetery -- Fienvillers British Cemetery -- Corbie la Neuville British Cemetery -- Hersin Communal Cemetery Extension -- Auchonvillers Military Cemetery -- Daours Communal Cemetery Extension -- Winchester College War Memorial Cloister -- Delville Wood -- Epilogue.

A Sweet View

Author: Malcolm Andrews
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144973
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
From country lanes to thatch roofs, a stroll through the enduring appeal of the nineteenth-century trope of rural English bliss. A Sweet View explores how writers and artists in the nineteenth century shaped the English countryside as a partly imaginary idyll, with its distinctive repertoire of idealized scenery: the village green, the old country churchyard, hedgerows and cottages, scenic variety concentrated into a small compass, snugness and comfort. The book draws on a very wide range of contemporary sources and features some of the key makers of the “South Country” rural idyll, including Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster, and Richard Jefferies. The legacy of the idyll still influences popular perceptions of the essential character of a certain kind of English landscape—indeed for Henry James that imagery constituted “the very essence of England” itself. As A Sweet View makes clear, the countryside idyll forged over a century ago is still with us today.

The Geographies of Englishness

Author: David Peters Corbett
Publisher: Paul Mellon Ctr for Studies
ISBN: 9780300094886
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the notion of Englishness was debated in English art and cultural circles. This study examines the intersection of national identity, modernisation and landscape in English art during 1880-1940.

Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

Author: Eithne Henson
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409442381
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
Examining representations of physical and metaphorical landscape in Charlotte Bront1/2, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Henson explores the way gender attitudes are expressed, both in descriptions of physical and metaphorical landscape and in the idea of nature, through the gendered voices of the narrators. Henson looks at the influence of changing aesthetic theory, arguing that factors such as scientific enquiry and industrialization changed the representation of landscape and of Englishness in these 'realist' novels."

A Companion to Cultural Geography

Author: James Duncan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470997257
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
A Companion to Cultural Geography brings together original contributions from 35 distinguished international scholars to provide a critical overview of this dynamic and influential field of study. Provides accessible overviews of key themes, debates and controversies from a variety of historical and theoretical vantage points Charts significant changes in cultural geography in the twentieth century as well as the principal approaches that currently animate work in the field A valuable resource not just for geographers but also those working in allied fields who wish to get a clear understanding of the contribution geography is making to cross-disciplinary debates