Landscape and Englishness (Spatial Practices 1) (Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series Cultural Hist)

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In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley’s travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr’s photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude’s travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence’s travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie’s writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness. Contents: The Spatial Practices Series Notes on Contributors Robert BURDEN: Introduction: Englishness and Spatial Practices Theory Chris THURGAR-DAWSON: Negotiating Englishness: Choropoetics, Reciprocal Spatial Realities and Holistic Spatial Semantics in William Renton’s ‘The Fork of the Road’ Christoph SCHUBERT: The Vertical Axis in Landscape Description: Elaborations of the Image Schemas UP and DOWN 19th Century and Before Ralph PORDZIK: England’s Domestic Others: The Tourist Construction of Agriculture and Landscape in William Cobbett’s Rural Rides Patrick PARRINDER: Character, Identity, and Nationality in the English Novel Bernhard KLEIN: “The natural home of Englishmen”: Froude’s Oceana and the Writing of the Sea Silvia MERGENTHAL: “The Architecture of the Devil”: Stonehenge, Englishness, English Fiction 20th Century Robert BURDEN: Home Thoughts from Abroad: Cultural Difference and the Critique of Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy and Other Travel Writing Ben KNIGHTS: In Search of England: Travelogue and Nation Between the Wars Stephan KOHL: Rural England: An Invention of the Motor Industries? Christine BERBERICH: This Green and Pleasant Land: Cultural Constructions of Englishness Contemporary Merle TÖNNIES: Foregrounding Boundary Zones: Martin Parr’s Photographic Constructions of Englishness Ruth HELYER: “England as a pure, white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above a silver winding river”: Fiction’s Alternative Histories