Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 : Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description PDF

Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the 'long' eighteenth century.

The book opens with a critique of recent writings in landscape studies before offering a new contextual framework within which to understand descriptions of landscape and the natural world.

It is contended that religion was the key force behind landscape descriptions and that denominational differences were at the heart of the differences between the descriptive practices of a range of canonical authors.

Robert J. Mayhew then fleshes out this contention by comparing the landscape descriptions of the 'mainstream' of Low-Church writers such as Addison, Fielding and Gilpin, with the practice of Samuel Johnson as a High-Church Anglican.

The book is a significant intervention in eighteenth-century intellectual history and will prove valuable to historians, critics and geographers alike.