Landscape and Literature

Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres.

Stephen Siddall (Author)

9780521729826, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 May 2009

130 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 0.9 cm, 0.22 kg

Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. Landscape and Literature introduces students to the exploration of different ways in which landscape has been represented in literature. It focuses on key aspects of this topic such as the importance of pastoral, contrasts between city and country, eighteenth-century developments from neo-classical to picturesque and Romantic ideas of the sublime, regional novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and varied styles of twentieth-century poetry from the Georgian poets to Heaney and Hughes. Poems and prose extracts from writers such as Marvell, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence and Seamus Heaney are included.

Introduction
1. Approaching landscape and literature: Classical influences
Biblical influences: Eden and expulsion
The garden of love
The greenwood
Elegant shepherds
Symbolic nature
The eighteenth century: the Enlightenment
Towards the Romantics
Confinement and space
Assignments
2. Approaching the texts: Chaucer's landscapes
Shakespeare's landscapes
Marvell's ingenuity
Landscapes for elegy
Landscapes for religion
The country house
Romantic solitude
Landscapes of childhood
The Romantics: the Sublime and the Gothic
Hardy's Wessex
Observation and beyond
Working the land
Desolated land
Ancient and modern
Assignments
3. Texts and extracts: Simon Armitage, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Parlement of Foulys
Thomas Carew, 'The Spring', John Clare, from The Shepherd's Calendar
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'Spring'
John Milton, from Paradise Lost
James Thomson, from The Seasons
Dorothy Wordsworth, from her Journals
Jane Austen, from Sense and Sensibility
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from 'Monte Blanc'
Matthew Arnold, from 'The Scholar Gipsy'
George Eliot, from The Mill on the Floss
John Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath
Thomas Hardy, from Tess of the D'Urbervilles
D.H. Lawrence, from The Rainbow
Edmund Blunden, from Undertones of War
Stella Gibbons, from Cold Comfort Farm
T.S. Eliot, from The Four Quartets
Richard Wilbur, 'Year's End'
William Golding, from Free Fall
Angela Carter, from 'The Erl-King'
Ted Hughes, from Tales from Ovid
4. Critical approaches: Political approaches
Feminist approaches
Ecological approaches
Assignments
5. How to write about landscape and literature: Responding to a poem
Responding to prose
Comparison
Preparing to write about a topic
Writing about the topic
Assignments
6. Resources: Further reading
Media resources: film and television
Websites
Glossary
Index
Acknowledgements.

Subject Areas: Educational: English literature [YQE]