The Politics of the Picturesque
Title | The Politics of the Picturesque PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen Copley |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 322 |
Release | 1994-03-10 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0521441137 |
Essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ways of looking at landscape, in theory and practice.
An Eye for the Tropics
Title | An Eye for the Tropics PDF eBook |
Author | Krista A. Thompson |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 421 |
Release | 2007-03-15 |
Genre | Photography |
ISBN | 0822388561 |
Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque “tropical” paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many in color, An Eye for the Tropics is a nuanced evaluation of the aesthetics of the “tropicalizing images” and their effects on Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands’ black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures. Analyzing the work of specific photographers and artists who created tropical representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the 1880s and the 1930s, Thompson shows how their images differ from the English picturesque landscape tradition. Turning to the present, she examines how tropicalizing images are deconstructed in works by contemporary artists—including Christopher Cozier, David Bailey, and Irénée Shaw—at the same time that they remain a staple of postcolonial governments’ vigorous efforts to attract tourists.
Inquiry Into the Picturesque
Title | Inquiry Into the Picturesque PDF eBook |
Author | Sidney K. Robinson |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 212 |
Release | 1991-08-13 |
Genre | Architecture |
ISBN | 9780226722511 |
The aesthetic mode of the picturesque has undergone so many transformations since its initial discussion in eighteenth-century England that it is hard to say just what it is. In these probing essays, Sidney K. Robinson re-examines the picturesque in its late eighteenth-century phase.
Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
Title | Jane Austen and the Enlightenment PDF eBook |
Author | Peter Knox-Shaw |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 296 |
Release | 2004-10-28 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9781139456678 |
Jane Austen was received by her contemporaries as a new voice, but her late twentieth-century reputation as a nostalgic reactionary still lingers on. In this radical revision of her engagement with the culture and politics of her age, Peter Knox-Shaw argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment, and that her allegiance to a sceptical tradition within it, shaped by figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume, lasted throughout her career. Knox-Shaw draws on archival and other neglected sources to reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere of the Steventon Rectory where Austen wrote her juvenilia, and follows the course of her work through the 1790s and onwards, showing how minutely responsive it was to the many shifting movements of those turbulent years. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment is an important contribution to the study both of Jane Austen and of intellectual history at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The Sound of the English Picturesque
Title | The Sound of the English Picturesque PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen Groves |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2023-12-04 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1000985911 |
Revealing the connections between the veneration of national landscape and eighteenth- century English vocal music, this study restores English music’s relationship with the picturesque. In the eighteenth century, the emerging taste for the picturesque was central to British aesthetics, as poets and painters gained popularity by glorifying the local landscape in works concurrent with the emergence of native countryside tourism. Yet English music was seldom discussed as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. Stephen Groves explores this gap, and shows how secular song, the glee, and national theatre music expressed a uniquely English engagement with landscape. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Groves addresses the apparent ‘silence’ of the English picturesque. The book draws on analysis of the visualisations present in the texts of English vocal music, and their musical treatment, to demonstrate how local composers incorporated celebrations of landscape into their works. The final chapter shows that the English picturesque was a crucial influence on Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons. Suitable for anyone with an interest in eighteenth- century music, aesthetics, and the natural environment, this book will appeal to a wide range of specialists and non- specialists alike.
Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874
Title | Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 PDF eBook |
Author | John Evelev |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 289 |
Release | 2021 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0192894552 |
Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, mid-century bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promoted in a variety of popular literary genres, all focused on landscape description and all of which trained readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed minor or have been forgotten by our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include everyone from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe), to major authors of the period now less familiar (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller), to those now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.
The Picturesque, The Sublime, The Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
Title | The Picturesque, The Sublime, The Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) PDF eBook |
Author | Valerie Derbyshire |
Publisher | Vernon Press |
Pages | 316 |
Release | 2019-12-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1622737466 |
This book considers the relationships between British Romantic-era novelist, poet and writer of educational works for children, Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), and a number of visual artists of the eighteenth century with whom she had connections. By exploring these associations with artists such as George Smith of Chichester, George Romney, James Northcote, John Raphael Smith and Emma Smith, the book demonstrates how the artwork of these individual artists influenced Charlotte Smith’s literary corpus. It also shows a mutual influence: how the literary works of Charlotte Smith impacted the corpora of these artists. This study uncovers information which was not heretofore known regarding these artists: it reveals a mistaken attribution of a sketch which accompanied the second volume of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1797) and sheds light on a print, held by the British Museum, which was previously shrouded in mystery. The artworks also enhance the existing scholarly knowledge about Smith’s biography. This book analyses the tropes and motifs employed by Smith’s artist-associates in the context of the popular aesthetics of the period and undertakes parallel readings between such visual artistry and Smith’s literary works. The book deliberates on how Smith utilises these aesthetics as narrative devices, making use of the tropes of the picturesque, the sublime and the beautiful, as well as that of a national British heraldic artwork, in order to produce and enhance meaning in her literary oeuvre. Thus, Smith uses aesthetic structures as vehicles for social critique, commentating on political, gender, moral and class concerns in addition to enhancing the perceived authenticity of her own artistry. The scholarship aims to correct the common misperception that Smith was a lonely marginal figure of Romanticism and instead asserts her central position in an enormous network of key artistic figures of British Romanticism.