Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800: Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description [Paperback]

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.Acknowledgements PART I: HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LANDSCAPE STUDIES Contextualising Landscape History Landscape History: An Essay in Historiographical Method PART II: LANDSCAPE AND RELIGION, 1660-1800: PRELIMINARY CONTEXTS Diversity and Coherence in the Discourse of Landscape in the 'Long' Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Survey Latitudinarianism and Landscape: Low Church Attitudes to Nature, 1660-1800 PART III: SAMUEL JOHNSON, HIGH CHURCHMANSHIP AND LANDSCAPE The Lexicon of Landscape: Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Natural Description The Moral Landscape: Johnson's Doctrine of Landscape, 1738-59 The Empirical Landscape: Johnson and the Factual Description of the Natural World, 1735-75 Life, Literature and Landscape: The Role of the Natural World in Johnson's Biographies and Biography, 1739-84 Conclusion: The Unfamiliar Prospect of Eighteenth Century Landscape Studies Notes BibliographyROBERT MAYHEW is a Lecturer in Historical Geography at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. He has published numerous articles in historical, literary and geographical journals and is author of Enlightenment Geography.