Landscape and Literature

by Stephen Siddall

• ISBN13: 9780521729826
• ISBN10: 0521729823
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-10-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Approaching landscape and literature: Classical influences

Biblical influences:Eden and expulsion

The garden of love

The greenwood

Elegant shepherds

Symbolic nature

The 18th century: the Enlightenment

Towards the Romantics

Confinement and space

Assignments

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.

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

Critical approaches: Political approaches

Feminist approaches

Ecological approaches

Assignments

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

Resources: Further reading

Media resources: film and television

Websites

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.