Since at least the Reformation, English men and women have been engaged in visiting, exploring and portraying, in words and images, the landscape of their nation. The Discovery of England examines these journeys and investigations to explore how the natural and historic English landscape was reconfigured to become a widely enjoyed cultural and leisure resource.
Peter Borsay considers the manifold forces behind this transformation, such as the rise of consumer culture, the media, industrial and transport revolutions, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Gothic revival. In doing so, he reveals the development of a powerful bond between landscape and natural identity, against the backdrop of social and political change from the early modern period to the start of the Second World War.
Borsay’s interdisciplinary approach demonstrates how human understandings of the natural world shaped the geography of England, and uncovers a wealth of valuable material, from novels and poems to paintings, that expose historical understandings of the landscape. This innovative approach illuminates how the English countryside and historic buildings became cultural icons behind which the nation was rallied during war-time, and explores the emergence of a post-war heritage industry that is now a definitive part of British cultural life.
Author(s): Peter Borsay; Rosemary Sweet
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 301
City: London
Cover
Contents
List of illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 Revealing the early modern landscape
Exploration and tourism
The discovery of the natural landscape
Exploring the human landscape
3 Ideas and representations
The Reformation
The Enlightenment
Romanticism
Representations
4 Reconfiguring the landscape
Ideas
Cultural media
Production and performance
Reception
5 New geographies and topographies
Imagined spaces
Town: Grey space
Country: Green space
Water: Blue space
Frameworks of spaces
6 Timescapes
Landscapes of memory and myth; stories and landscape
Deep history: Geology and natural history
Pre-history
Recent pasts and competing pasts
Old towns and villages
Landscape as modernism; the modernist seaside and countryside
7 Economic and social change
Industrialization
Urbanization
Leisure
8 The transport revolution and the journey
The transport revolution and recreational travel
Walking
Experiencing the journey
9 Identities
Landscape, identities and nation
The British paradox
Race and empire
Religion, class and gender
10 Conclusion: The Second World War and beyond
The Second World War
Modernity and the post-war decades
Towards the millennium and beyond
Select bibliography
Index
