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

by Rachel Crawford

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521815314
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2002
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.29(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Rachel Crawford is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of San Francisco. She has published articles in Studies in Romanticism, and European Romantic Review.

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.

Editorial Reviews

"...highly imaginative and extensively researched...This book provides a wealth of information..." The Dalhouse Review

"One might have thought there was little more to say about parliamentary enclosures in the last quarter of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th. But Crawford powerfully exposes the ideological and aesthetic underpinnings of these often-anguished debates.... Theoretically alert yet a lively read. Highly recommended." Choice

"A rich and enjoyable book." Studies in English Literature

From the Publisher