Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800

"Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800" offers a revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the "long" 18th century. Landscape has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of 18th century English culture; this book surveys those debates and offers its own account. Robert Mayhew shows that describing landscape was a religiously contested practice, and that different theological positions led differing authors to different descriptive approaches. Landscape description, then, shows English intellectual life still in the grips of a Christian and classical mentality in the "long" 18th century.