Landscape and Englishness

Abstract

Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. This book argues that, in fact, 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. Extensively illustrated, the book draws on a wide range of materials, including 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 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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 525 citations exist upstream.