Description: Concentrating on Britain and France, the book addresses its subject in an interdisciplinary fashion, drawing on poetry, novels, landscape gardens, spectacular entertainments, and science as well as visual art in order to elucidate panoramic art, and questions of spectral or ghostly visions. These topics set in play the themes of the subjective, and the scientific/imperial that are further developed throughout the book.
Review Quotes:
'...a consistently illuminating and eloquent study of landscape perception and its metaphoric resonances throughout the visual and literary arts of nineteenth-century Europe. The remarkable breadth of reference and the inter-media range of the book will engage a wide academic audience concerned with the prevailing and interwoven tropes of nature, the visual imagination, and cultural identity during this period...' Brian Lukacher, Vassar College, USA
'In shuttling across the field of landscape and visual culture, Charlesworth does not restrict himself to landscape painting, but rather widens his view, developing, as a result, a highly inter-textual treatment of the field of landscape and visual culture. The resulting volume is a rich exploration of the intersections across the registers of cultural media, taking in painting, literature novels, gardens and public entertainments. ...the result of reading this volume is a sense of time well spent and of many things having been learned, the sort of polymathical education that too few contemporary volumes manage to deliver.' Landscape History