Introduction

Summary

Arguments

The chief concerns of this book are eighteenth-century discourses on landscape and the nature of the authority which those discourses conferred upon their writers and readers. It will be my argument that these discourses have complex and at times conflicting ideological and political functions which criticism needs to explore if it is to understand the changing constructions of and relationships between poetic, critical, natural, and political power in the period, constructions which were instrumental in shaping a sense of national identity. First, a definition: by the term ‘discourses on landscape’ I shall refer not only to representation which claims simply to describe nature, but also to writing which uses the motifs and scenes of landscape–description in the course of critical and political arguments. I begin with Thomson as the first major poet to make an extended treatment of the British landscape in the post-Miltonic period, and I end with Wordsworth and Coleridge as the last to do so. But I shall not be treating their verse simply as a collection of prospect-views or picturesque scenes. Instead I shall try to put it in the contexts of contemporary debates in politics, aesthetics and criticism, to show that it was one of many efforts (with some of which it was in competition) to define the proper nature of moral and political authority for a nation whose physical and social organization was changing rapidly.