The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840 - Brossura

Corbin, Alain; Phelps, Jocelyn

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0140247998 ISBN 13: 9780140247992

Casa editrice: Penguin, 1995

Riassunto

This wonderful book explores the dramatic change in Western attitude toward the sea and seaside pleasures that occurred between 1750 and 1840. Interest in travel; the arrival of landscape painting, geology, and natural theology; fashions in medicine and the advent of the bathing-machine; the emergence of Romanticism and the Sublime—these are only some of the elements that helped transform perceptions.
 
There was no sea in the Garden of Eden, and for centuries the Earth’s ocean was looked upon with hostility, as a chaotic remnant of the flood. But by the time Jane Austen wrote Sandition—perhaps the first ‘seaside’ novel—in 1817, the sea and shore had come to be viewed as something intensely and sensuously pleasurable, with beach holidays all the rage in new resorts from Brighton and Scarborough to Dieppe.
 
“A compact and brilliant taxonomy of the shifting meanings of the sea and shore.”—The New York Review of Books

Su questo libro

Product Description:

This is an account of how the pleasures of the seaside were discovered in the Western World. Based on the premiss that how we see the landscape over time is shaped not just by nature but also by the cultural baggage we bring to it, this book argues that with few exceptions, people living before the 18th century knew nothing of the attractions of the coast. The sea was perceived as sinister and unchanging, an unfathomable force inspiring horror, associated with floods, sea monsters and the like. With the Enlightenment, a change occurred. The book follows a course from a theocentric interpretation of the shore as the line drawn by God's finger after the Flood, through the sea as experienced by Neoclassical travellers on the Grand Tour, to the beloved sea of the Romantic poets and the growth of the popular seaside resort that came in their wake.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Penguin
• Data di pubblicazione: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140247998
• ISBN 13: 9780140247992
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 416