Landscapes and Townscapes
Landscapes and Townscapes
Contributor(s): Grażyna Bystydzieńska (Editor), Magdalena Pypeć (Editor)
Subject(s): History, Language and Literature Studies, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, Middle Ages, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: landscape gardening; picturesque; countryside; aesthetic; pastoral; city; urban space; crime; urban satire; suburbs; adaptation
Summary/Abstract: The essays in this volume discuss various aspects of urbanscapes and landscapes, and analyse their depiction and significance in selected literary and visual works, exploring various approaches to the city, urban spaces, landscape, countryside and topography in the British literature and culture of the long 18th and 19th centuries.
Series: Texts and Contexts. Studies in 18th and 19th century British Literature and Culture
- E-ISBN-13: 978-83-235-4873-7
- Print-ISBN-13: 978-83-235-4865-2
- Page Count: 126
- Publication Year: 2021
- Language: English
Humphry Repton and the Pocketbook Picturesque
Humphry Repton and the Pocketbook Picturesque
(Humphry Repton and the Pocketbook Picturesque)
- Author(s):Stephen Daniels
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
- Page Range:14-27
- No. of Pages:14
- Keywords:Humphry Repton; pocketbooks; landscape gardening; picturesque
- Summary/Abstract:The aim of the article is to examine one the most successful pocketbooks of the period, "The Polite Repository, or Pocket Companion", illustrated by designs by Humphry Repton, of places he was commissioned to improve. The illustrations for "The Polite Repository" display the repertoire of Repton’s art, the social range of properties, including aristocratic palaces, gentry manor houses, and suburban villas of merchants and professionals. One of the effects of the small, standardised format was to represent properties of vastly different size, style and status, within a common scenic genre, part of Repton’s promotion of a form of polite landscape which united many social ranks. The vignettes show various features, beyond the mansions, lodges, conservatories, pavilions, grottoes, flower gardens, woodlands, lakes, riversides, and wider views of the country, such as ranges of hills and sea views. The views include some parkland animals - sheep and deer - also human figures, including residents and visitors. Many view points are from a public road, displaying Repton’s art, and the properties of his clients, to passing travellers, including the many tourists from polite society who were patriotically discovering the British landscape, now that war had closed continental Europe to tourism. Repton donated the drawings for the publication, to promote his career and showcase the properties of his clients. The illustrations for "The Polite Repository" are part of Repton’s project to reclaim the concept of the picturesque from his learned antagonists: Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price.
- Price: 4.50 €
G.M. Hopkins: Landscape with a Rainbow
G.M. Hopkins: Landscape with a Rainbow
(G.M. Hopkins: Landscape with a Rainbow)
- Author(s):Aleksandra Kędzierska
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
- Page Range:29-39
- No. of Pages:11
- Keywords:Hopkins; landscape; rainbow; aestheticism; Divine
- Summary/Abstract:Hopkins’s poems abound in landscapes. Sometimes, as is the case with “Pied Beauty,” “plotted and pieced, / fold, fallow and plough,” they offer a panorama of the world “charged” with the grandeur of God. The power, yet also humour and beauty, of the Creator reveal themselves in numerous cloud- or sea-scapes, and in truth all nature captured in Hopkins’s poetic vignettes - rocks and meadows, trees and plants, stars, rainbows and sunsets - allows an insight into the glory of creation. Through his aesthetic of the Christian belief, Hopkins, as Charles Taylor has it, forges “a surprising new itinerary” for faith in an age of disenchantment, as a poet “graced with rare insight” to see the concrete “particular in all its specificity” participating in a universal “communion” of Divine love, wisdom, and beauty (764). Focusingon Hopkins’s fascination with rainbows and discussing the treatment of “nature’s arc” in his poetry, this paper will demonstrate how this particular “inscape of his environment” (Nelson), channeling Christological, ontological, and also ecological didactics, narrates the story of Hopkins’s relationship with the Divine: the poet’s plunge into aestheticism followed by his discovery of the prismatic, rainbow-like nature of the Divine.
- Price: 4.50 €
Nature, Nostalgia, and the Countryside (Goldsmith, Gilpin, and Cobbett)
Nature, Nostalgia, and the Countryside (Goldsmith, Gilpin, and Cobbett)
(Nature, Nostalgia, and the Countryside (Goldsmith, Gilpin, and Cobbett))
- Author(s):Przemysław Uściński
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
- Page Range:41-53
- No. of Pages:13
- Keywords:countryside; pastoral poetry; enclosures; picturesque; nostalgia; ecocriticism
- Summary/Abstract:In "The Song of the Earth", an ecocritical reading of numerous English writers of the countryside (Gilpin, Wordsworth, Austen and Hardy, among others), Jonathan Bate draws attention to the ambiguity of nostalgia, a feeling the implications of which entail both the idealization of the past and, Bates argues, the potentially valuable critique of the present. While focusing on Oliver Goldsmith’s influential poem “The Deserted Village” (1770) and its later resonance and reception, I refer also to such writers and thinkers as Crabbe and Cobbett, for whom the poetical meditation on the countryside compels an often wide-ranging political reflection on change and progress, on (human) nature as well as on politics and economy. I consider the ambivalence of nostalgia together with the notion of the picturesque as discussed by Gilpin. The fashionable “aesthetization” of the countryside in picturesque representations risks obliterating its historical transformations as discussed by Goldsmith. If nostalgic longing risks cancelling history by returning to the idealized past, the picturesque risks, in turn, erasing human labour by “naturalizing” itself as a mere framing of nature, or a mere adjustment of our perception of what is presumed to be already naturally present, but which may, in fact, be constructed through our nostalgic longing for such presence.
- Price: 4.50 €
Multiplying Unintelligibility: Joyce, Schizophrenia, Cities and Crime
Multiplying Unintelligibility: Joyce, Schizophrenia, Cities and Crime
(Multiplying Unintelligibility: Joyce, Schizophrenia, Cities and Crime)
- Author(s):Jeremy Tambling
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
- Page Range:57-78
- No. of Pages:22
- Keywords:Joyce; Ulysses; schizophrenia; city; crime
- Summary/Abstract:The attempt to ‘read’ the city and so to master it has been the subject of so much writing: Wordsworth, Blake, De Quincey, Dickens, Gissing, and Joyce being some examples from the ‘English’ tradition. But the modern city, unlike the village, or the country-setting, cannot be read, because it knows no inside or outside; its exterior harbours secrets as much as its interiors; put another way, the city allows no separation between the person who tries to understand it, and what is beheld: it allows no single-subject position to exist as the observer. This increasing failure, despite the attention given to conceptualising cities in such figures as Engels, or Georg Simmel, or Walter Benjamin, produces writing which may be considered as marked by a schizoid tendency, defining schizophrenia in terms of a loss of ego-boundaries, an inability to distinguish inside from outside, which may in turn be paranoiainducing. This article will move through several Romantic and nineteenth-century examples of such writing, focusing at last on James Joyce and Ulysses as texts which were in their own time thought of as schizophrenic, tending to the destruction of language as that which can distinguish inside and outside. What then is the relation of the city to schizophrenia? It is a question this article wishes to provoke.
- Price: 4.50 €
City and Irony: London’s Contradictions in Samuel Johnson’s London
City and Irony: London’s Contradictions in Samuel Johnson’s London
(City and Irony: London’s Contradictions in Samuel Johnson’s London)
- Author(s):Przemysław Uściński
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
- Page Range:79-88
- No. of Pages:10
- Keywords:Samuel Johnson; urban satire; city; irony; eighteenth-century London
- Summary/Abstract:The article discusses Samuel Johnson’s early poem, London (1738), written in imitation of Juvenal’s Third Satire. It considers the trope of irony as employed in the poem within its imitative mode, examines the construction of the speaker in the poem and, in particular, Johnson’s satiric depiction of the eighteenth-century London as the place that intensifies contrasts and contradictions and hence defies attempts at clear definition. The poem is also placed in the broader tradition of eighteenth-century urban satire. More specifically, the article looks at Dr Johnson’s treatment of the disjunction between the moral and the economic that seems to define Britain’s capital for him. Consequently, his construction of Englishness in this piece appears to be outlined in direct contrast with his satiric representation of London’s cosmopolitan urban milieu, which Johnson tends to link with foreign influences as well as with chaos and corruption.
- Price: 4.50 €
Arnold Bennett’s Romance of the Suburbs
Arnold Bennett’s Romance of the Suburbs
(Arnold Bennett’s Romance of the Suburbs)
- Author(s):Małgorzata Nitka
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
- Page Range:89-100
- No. of Pages:12
- Keywords:Bennett; A Man from the North; suburbs; writing; romance; monotony; individuality
- Summary/Abstract:"A Man from the North" (1898), Arnold Bennett’s first novel, reflects, to a certain degree, the end-of-the-century shift in which, as Lynne Hapgood contends, suburbs rather than city constitute the narrative location and become a literary subject in its own right. The novel tells the story of Richard Larch who comes to London to attempt a literary career, for which he believes himself destined. He fails to accomplish the dream as he lacks both talent and commitment, while the dream itself turns out to be a piece of self-delusion. He turns out to be more suited to the regular and unimaginative life of a clerk and husband commuting to work from the suburbs. Even though this conclusion suggests that the suburban pattern of life may annihilate literary creativity, Bennett considers possibilities of their reconciliation. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between writing and suburbs as shown in the novel as well as to discuss larger, social and cultural, implications of the suburbs.
- Price: 4.50 €
City as a Nightmare: The Treatment of Urban Space in "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and Its Selected Visual Interpretations
City as a Nightmare: The Treatment of Urban Space in "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and Its Selected Visual Interpretations
(City as a Nightmare: The Treatment of Urban Space in "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and Its Selected Visual Interpretations)
- Author(s):Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
- Page Range:101-123
- No. of Pages:23
- Keywords:The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Robert Louis Stevenson; city; urban space; book illustration; graphic novel; adaptation
- Summary/Abstract:The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, has inspired numerous interpretations and adaptations in visual and audio-visual media. While its popularity and cultural resonance should be ascribed first and foremost to the captivating portrayal of doctor Henry Jekyll and his evil alter ego, the setting of the controversial story merits attention as well, especially because it happens to be “integral to the situations played out within it” (Ridenhour 12). Presented as “a labyrinth of uncertain topography and confusing repetitions” (Dury 63), constantly transformed and distorted due to the intricate narratorial pattern, Stevenson’s London in Jekyll and Hyde remains an enigmatic, underwritten space and, therefore, a considerable challenge in terms of visual reimagining. From the point of view of the present article, of particular interest will be the work done by several artists who either provided illustrations for the novella or condensed its content into graphic novels. The common denominator for the examples selected is the representation of the city as a nightmare. Furthermore, as rendered by artists such as Charles Raymond Macauley, S. G. Hulme Beaman, Nestor Redondo, Thomas Van Der Linde, and Angela Barrett, the visualized “urbanscapes” function also as an extension of the narrators’ inner turmoil and a marker of the symbiotic, if toxic, relationship between the fictional characters and their (artificial) environment.
- Price: 4.50 €
