The English Garden: Literary Sources and Documents - Rilegato

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1873403119 ISBN 13: 9781873403112

Casa editrice: Helm Information Ltd, 1993

Riassunto

In a country with a long and vigorous tradition of making gardens of all sizes, dating back to long before the Renaissance, and then of writing about the gardens that have been made, no single collection could ever cover all the literature available. There exists a vast record of responses to gardens on many different levels: as the providers of food and sensory stimulus; as the material for philosophical and religious meditation; as landscapes, that is, aesthetic objects designed to chiefly to be looked at; as sites for imaginative play and escapades. The sources and documents collected in these volumes are representative of these responses, and can be grouped in three broad categories: there are many descriptions of historical gardens, which blend visitors' responses with attempts to describe the gardens visited; there are "prescriptions" by writers of what ideal gardens "should" look like, many fanciful and some philosophically serious; finally, there are "meditations" on gardens and the processes of garden-making, which attempt to reach different, more rigorous or more suggestive levels of response. These categories have not been separated out from each other - they are mixed up within the chronological and thematic progressions in order to allow the full intertextual play of the discourse to emerge. "Volume 1" covers the late-16th, 17th and early-18th centuries which saw the creation of the idea that gardens could be terrains that were morally, as well as physically important. As garden-makers on different social levels, from yeoman farmers to arstocrats and monarchs, publicized and reflected in their work, there is seen a variety of motivations, from snobbery to scientific impulse, from religion to the pursuit of beautiful, earthly places, combining to assert the high moral and aesthetic possibilities of gardening and gardens as areas for representation. "Volume 2" breaks from a chronological sequence to group into themes the material about the crucially important 18th century. It opens with a section about important specific gardens - the socially and intellectually influential garden of Queen Caroline at Richmond (1732), that of the poet Alexander Pope, and the gardens of Stowe which belonged to an aristocrat active in government, military and cultural fields. Themes of cultural politics unfold around many more examples, some canonical, some associated with famous gardeners, such as Lancelot "Capability" Brown, and others which are much less known and even obscure. Certain source materials are presented for the first time. A major section deals with theoretical works of the period 1768-1772, which can be regarded in some senses as the high-water mark for gardens as aesthetically, morally and politically engrossing domains. The volume concludes with consideration of the legal status of gardens, and the poetry of protest against acts of landscape gardening. "Volume 3" returns to a chronological progression to chart the subsequent history of garden literature in England. There are responses from poets, jobbing gardeners, an Egyptologist and architects. The volume reflects both the responses of visitors, such as Samuel Johnson, Wiliam Gilpin and William Cobbett, and the active presences of Humphry Repton and J.C. Loudon who intervened both practically and theoretically to change the course of garden-making. Selections after 1850 become necessarily less comprehensive, focusing simply on the late debate about the art of gardens undertaken by Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson and Reginald Blomfield, and including items that begin to intimate some of the major currents in conceptions of gardens in the 20th century, when traditional ideas about scale, representation and integrity became fragmented. Taken together, these three volumes provide a resource of primary" source material for students and researchers in the fields of English literature, garden and architectural history and English social history.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Helm Information Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1873403119
• ISBN 13: 9781873403112
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 1400
• Redattore: Charlesworth Michael