The Helm Information literary sources & documents series
著者
書誌事項
The Helm Information literary sources & documents series
Helm Information
- タイトル別名
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The Helm Information literary sources and documents series
注記
General editor: Graham Clarke
内容説明・目次
内容説明
In a country with a long and vigorous tradition of making gardens of all sizes, dating back to long before the Renaissance, and then of writing about the gardens that have been made, no single collection could ever cover all the literature available. There exists a vast record of responses to gardens on many different levels: as the providers of food and sensory stimulus; as the material for philosophical and religious meditation; as landscapes, that is, aesthetic objects designed to chiefly to be looked at; as sites for imaginative play and escapades. The sources and documents collected in these volumes are representative of these responses, and can be grouped in three broad categories: there are many descriptions of historical gardens, which blend visitors' responses with attempts to describe the gardens visited; there are "prescriptions" by writers of what ideal gardens "should" look like, many fanciful and some philosophically serious; finally, there are "meditations" on gardens and the processes of garden-making, which attempt to reach different, more rigorous or more suggestive levels of response.
These categories have not been separated out from each other - they are mixed up within the chronological and thematic progressions in order to allow the full intertextual play of the discourse to emerge. "Volume 1" covers the late-16th, 17th and early-18th centuries which saw the creation of the idea that gardens could be terrains that were morally, as well as physically important. As garden-makers on different social levels, from yeoman farmers to arstocrats and monarchs, publicized and reflected in their work, there is seen a variety of motivations, from snobbery to scientific impulse, from religion to the pursuit of beautiful, earthly places, combining to assert the high moral and aesthetic possibilities of gardening and gardens as areas for representation. "Volume 2" breaks from a chronological sequence to group into themes the material about the crucially important 18th century. It opens with a section about important specific gardens - the socially and intellectually influential garden of Queen Caroline at Richmond (1732), that of the poet Alexander Pope, and the gardens of Stowe which belonged to an aristocrat active in government, military and cultural fields.
Themes of cultural politics unfold around many more examples, some canonical, some associated with famous gardeners, such as Lancelot "Capability" Brown, and others which are much less known and even obscure. Certain source materials are presented for the first time. A major section deals with theoretical works of the period 1768-1772, which can be regarded in some senses as the high-water mark for gardens as aesthetically, morally and politically engrossing domains. The volume concludes with consideration of the legal status of gardens, and the poetry of protest against acts of landscape gardening. "Volume 3" returns to a chronological progression to chart the subsequent history of garden literature in England. There are responses from poets, jobbing gardeners, an Egyptologist and architects. The volume reflects both the responses of visitors, such as Samuel Johnson, Wiliam Gilpin and William Cobbett, and the active presences of Humphry Repton and J.C. Loudon who intervened both practically and theoretically to change the course of garden-making.
Selections after 1850 become necessarily less comprehensive, focusing simply on the late debate about the art of gardens undertaken by Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson and Reginald Blomfield, and including items that begin to intimate some of the major currents in conceptions of gardens in the 20th century, when traditional ideas about scale, representation and integrity became fragmented. Taken together, these three volumes provide a resource of primary" source material for students and researchers in the fields of English literature, garden and architectural history and English social history.
目次
- Volume 1 A chronological overview 1550-1730: Elizabethan polarities
- contructing the moral domain
- taking stock
- blueprints and critiques
- professional opinions
- "my own territories"
- Volume 2 The 18th century - opinions, decriptions and controversies: Queen Caroline's Hermitage at Richmond Gardens
- Alexander Pope's garden and garden writing
- Stowe
- brief descriptions 1732-1765
- aesthetic judgements 1752-1771
- William Shenstone and the Leasowes
- brief descriptions 1760-1770
- theoretical writings 1768-1772
- Lancelot "Capability" Brown
- the law and gardens
- protests against landscape gardening and enclosure. Volume 3 Chronological overview 1772-1910.
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