Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830

This book examines the intriguing, often problematic, relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.

Rachel Crawford (Author)

9780521815314, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 September 2002

334 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.6 cm, 0.66 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Crawford's argument yields surprising and productive conclusions. By liberally mixing resources currently constrained within separate academic disciplines, Crawford's work will open up vaster fields of knowledge for readers, challenging the assumptions of literary history with those of agricultural history and vice versa.' The Agricultural History Review

Rachel Crawford examines the intriguing, often problematic, relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Crawford focuses on the gradual change during this period when the British taste for open space gradually gave way to a preference for confined space, so that by the beginning of the Regency period contained sites, both topographical and poetic, were perceived to express authentic English qualities. In this context, Crawford discusses the highly fraught parliamentary enclosure movement, which closed off the last of England's open fields between 1760 and 1815. Crawford takes enclosure as a prevailing metaphor for a reconceptualisation of the aesthetics of space in which enclosed and confined sites became associated with productivity, and sets explicit images, such as the apple, the iron industry, and the kitchen garden within the context of georgic and minor lyric poetry.

List of illustrations
Part I. Representational Spaces: Introduction: expansion and contraction
1. Codifying containment: the parliamentary enclosures
2. Altering the prospects: Switzer, Whately, and Repton
Part II. The Poetry of Earth: 3. English Georgic and British nationhood
4. Philips's Cyder: Englishing the apple
5. Jago's Edge-Hill: simulation and representation
Part III. Infinitude Confined: 6. Lyric art
7. The kitchen garden manual
8. The poetics of the bower: Keats, Coleridge, and Hemans
Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]