Landscape, literature and english religious culture 1660-1800 : samuel johnson and languages ... of natural description

Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the 'long' Eighteenth-century. Landscape has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of Eighteenth-century English culture; this book surveys those debates and offers a provocative new account. Mayhew shows that describing landscape was a religiously contested practice, and that different theological positions led differing authors to different descriptive approaches. Landscape description, then, shows English intellectual life still in the grips of a Christian and classical mentality in the 'long' Eighteenth-century. Front Matter....Pages i-vi Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Contextualizing Landscape History: Mainly with Respect to Eighteenth-Century England....Pages 3-25 Landscape History: An Essay in Historiographical Method....Pages 26-38 Front Matter....Pages 39-39 Diversity and Coherence in the Discourse of Landscape in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Survey....Pages 41-69 Latitudinarianism and Landscape: Low-Church Attitudes to Nature, 1660–1800....Pages 70-126 Front Matter....Pages 127-127 The Lexicon of Landscape: Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Natural Description....Pages 129-153 The Moral Landscape: Johnson’s Doctrine of Landscape, 1738–59....Pages 154-212 The Empirical Landscape: Johnson and Factual Description of the Natural World, 173 5–75....Pages 213-261 Life, Literature and Landscape: The Role of the Natural World in Johnson’s Biographies and Biography, 1739–84....Pages 262-308 Conclusion: The Unfamiliar Prospect of Eighteenth-Century Landscape Studies....Pages 309-317 Back Matter....Pages 318-426 Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the 'long' eighteenth century. The book opens with a critique of recent writings in landscape studies before offering a new contextual framework within which to understand descriptions of landscape and the natural world. It is contended that religion was the key force behind landscape descriptions and that denominational differences were at the heart of the differences between the descriptive practices of a range of canonical authors. Robert J. Mayhew then fleshes out this contention by comparing the landscape descriptions of the 'mainstream' of Low-Church writers such as Addison, Fielding and Gilpin, with the practice of Samuel Johnson as a High-Church Anglican. The book is a significant intervention in eighteenth-century intellectual history and will prove valuable to historians, critics and geographers alike