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

by Rachel Crawford

• ISBN13: 9780521815314
• ISBN10: 0521815312
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Rachel Crawford examines the intriguing, often problematic relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain. She discusses the highly contested parliamentary enclosure movement which closed off the last of England's open fields between 1760 and 1815. She considers enclosure as a prevailing metaphor for a reconceptualization of the aesthetics of space in which enclosed and confined sites became associated with productivity. She then examines explicit landscape imagery--such as the apple, the iron industry, and the kitchen garden--within the context of georgic and minor lyric poetry.

Table of Contents

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.