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. The book opens with a critique of recent writings in landscape studies before offering a new contextual framework within which to understand descriptions of landscape and the natural world. It is contended that religion was the key force behind landscape descriptions and that denominational differences were at the heart of the differences between the descriptive practices of a range of canonical authors. Robert J. Mayhew then fleshes out this contention by comparing the landscape descriptions of the 'mainstream' of Low-Church writers such as Addison, Fielding and Gilpin, with the practice of Samuel Johnson as a High-Church Anglican. The book is a significant intervention in eighteenth-century intellectual history and will prove valuable to historians, critics and geographers alike.
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
ROBERT MAYHEW is a Lecturer in Historical Geography at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. He has published numerous articles in historical, literary and geographical journals and is author of Enlightenment Geography.