The Iconography of landscape : essays on the symbolic representation, design, and use of past environments

The Iconography of Landscape, first published in 1988, draws together fourteen scholars from diverse disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to explicate the status of landscape as a cultural image, 'a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings'. By applying the art-historical method of iconography - interpreting levels of meaning in human artifacts - to landscapes on paper or canvas, in literary form or on its ground, its contributors show how landscape is an important mode of human signification, informed by, and itself informing, social, cultural and political issues. The range of examples is wide in terms of medium, period and place. It covers poetry and promotional literature, architectural design and urban ceremonial, maps and paintings. The historical periods discussed include sixteenth-century Italy, eighteenth-century England, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland and twentieth-century Canada. The book is introduced by the editors' discussion of the meanings of landscape and of the iconographic method in the context of contemporary theoretical and methodological debates on culture and society.

Preface

Introduction: iconography and landscapeStephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove

1 The geography of Mother NaturePeter Fuller

2 The evocative symbolism of treesDouglas Davies

3 The political iconography of woodland in later Georgian EnglandStephen Daniels

4 Places and dwellings: Wordsworth, Clare and the anti-picturesqueJohn Lacas

5 Art and agrarian change, 1710-1815Hugh Prince

6 'Fields of radiance': the scientific and industrial scenes of Joseph WrightDavid Fraser

7 The privation of history: Landseer, Victoria and the Highland myth TrevorP. Pringle

8 The iconography of nationhood in Canadian artBrian S. Osborne

9 Rhetoric of the western interior: modes of environmental description in American promotional literature of the nineteenth centuryG. Malcolm Lewis

10 Symbolism, 'ritualism' and the location of crowds in early nineteenth-century English townsMark Harrison

11 Symbol of the Second Empire: cultural politics and the Paris Opera HousePenelope Woolf

12 The sphinx in the north: egyptian influences on landscape, architecture and interior design in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ScotlandEric Grant

13 The geometry of landscape: practical and speculative arts in sixteenth-century Venetian land territoriesDenis Cosgrove

14 Maps, knowledge, and powerJ. B. Harley

Index

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Summary

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Table of Contents