Landscape and Englishness: Second Expanded Edition (Picturing History) - Softcover

David Matless

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178023581X ISBN 13: 9781780235813

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Landscape and Englishness" is an essential read for anyone interested in why some kinds of interaction with nature are celebrated and others are frowned on. Drawing on a huge diversity of sources books, films, preservationist tracts, walking guides, novels, music-hall songs, Ministry of Information pamphlets, maps, and festival guides Matless reveals how our assumptions about landscape and national identity were forged in the decades between the Great War and the 1950s, and how deeply they ve been shaped by history, class and politics . . . a revelation. --Helen Macdonald "Guardian ""

Landscape and Englishness is an essential read for anyone interested in why some kinds of interaction with nature are celebrated and others are frowned on. Drawing on a huge diversity of sources books, films, preservationist tracts, walking guides, novels, music-hall songs, Ministry of Information pamphlets, maps, and festival guides Matless reveals how our assumptions about landscape and national identity were forged in the decades between the Great War and the 1950s, and how deeply they ve been shaped by history, class and politics . . . a revelation. --Helen Macdonald "Guardian ""

"Landscape and Englishness is an essential read for anyone interested in why some kinds of interaction with nature are celebrated and others are frowned on. Drawing on a huge diversity of sources--books, films, preservationist tracts, walking guides, novels, music-hall songs, Ministry of Information pamphlets, maps, and festival guides--Matless reveals how our assumptions about landscape and national identity were forged in the decades between the Great War and the 1950s, and how deeply they've been shaped by history, class and politics . . . a revelation."--Helen Macdonald "Guardian "

About the Author:

David Matless is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads (2014) and The Regional Book (2015), and co-editor of Geographies of British Modernity (2003) and The Place of Music (1998).

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 178023581X
• ISBN 13: 9781780235813
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 368