The great good place : the country house and English literature
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The great good place : the country house and English literature
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993
Available at 18 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliography and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This text examines ow the ideal of the country house has grown in English literature over the centuries. It tells the story of a distinctive English tradition, made so by the poets of the Renaissance, and shaped further by the novelists of the 18th century who depicted the country house as the ideal place for the good life. It is a tradition rooted in a literary past. "The Great Good Place" shows how our ways of seeing are shaped by reading. It looks at houses such as Penshurst Place, Stowe and Kelmscott, made famous by writers, and reads them in the light of those writings. Van Dyck's family portrait at Wilton acquires new meaning if seen in terms of the literature of the age; even the decoration of a stove at Kedleston has resonances which carry the reader back to the classical world. In this study, there is no division between the visual arts and literature, or between high culture and the commonplace. A novel, or a National Trust guidebook, a great landscape garden or the design of a dormer window all form part of the spectrum of meaning.
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