identity

Literary Landscapes

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Sixty maps, a gazetteer, and critical essays place the great writers of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland against the background of their native regions. Identifies geographic locations mentioned in the works of English authors and discusses the influence locations may have had on their work.

Contents:

–Chaucer’s world: Chaucer’s London; Touring with Chaucer’s pilgrims; Chaucer overseas: the country of his mind —
–Shakespeare’s London —
–Dr. Johnson’s London —
–Charles Dickens’s London —
–Virginia Woolf’s London : a walking tour with Mrs. Dalloway —
–Bath —
–Lake poets —
–Romantic poets abroad —
–Bronte country —
–Thomas Hardy’s Wessex —
–Blackening of England —
–Scotland in literature : Kidnapped: a topographical novel; Edinburgh —
–Dublin of Yeats and Joyce: After Parnell; Wanderings of Ulysses; Other testimony —
–Atlas and gazetteer section: Atlas; General gazetteer; London gazetteer; Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Inns of Court; Schools; Geographical index.

Landscape and English National Identity

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“People have always attached meaning to the landscape that surrounds them. In Storied Ground Paul Readman uncovers why landscape matters so much to the English people, exploring its particular importance in shaping English national identity amid the transformations of modernity. The book takes us from the fells of the Lake District to the uplands of Northumberland; from the streetscapes of industrial Manchester to the heart of London. This panoramic journey reveals the significance, not only of the physical characteristics of landscapes, but also of the sense of the past, collective memories and cultural traditions that give these places their meaning. Between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, Englishness extended far beyond the pastoral idyll of chocolate-box thatched cottages, waving fields of corn and quaint country churches. It was found in diverse locations – urban as well as rural, north as well as south – and it took strikingly diverse forms.”

Image and text reproduced from Amazon

Landscape & Englishness

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“Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material – topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural, progressive and preservationist, took shape around debates over building in the countryside, the replanning of cities, and the cultures of leisure and citizenship. He concludes by tracing out the story of landscape and Englishness down to the present day, showing how the familiar terms of debate regarding landscape and heritage are a product of the immediate post-war era, and asking how current arguments over care for the environment or expressions of the nation resonate with earlier histories and geographies.”

Text and image reproduced from Amazon

England’s Green

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Explores English national identity and the environment, spanning agriculture, nature and culture.

England is known as a ‘green and pleasant’ land, but what does this mean? England’s Green explores how the country’s connection with the environment has shaped and reflected English national identity since the 1960s, when pollution, pesticides, industrial farming and upset ecologies were presented as signs of a world gone wrong. This book examines English cultures of nature, land, farming and other ways in which humans engage with the natural world; or with a world whose naturalness seems increasingly pressured and in question. From agriculture to nature, leisure, climate change, the folkloric, the archaeological and the mystical, David Matless uncovers the genealogies of today’s debates over land and culture, showing how twenty-first-century concerns and anxieties have been moulded by events over the past sixty years. From government policy to popular music, and from ecological polemic to television comedy, England’s Green shows the richness and complexity of English environmental culture.