Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France

Concentrating on Britain and France, the book addresses its subject in an interdisciplinary fashion, drawing on poetry, novels, landscape gardens, spectacular entertainments, and science as well as visual art in order to elucidate panoramic art, and questions of spectral or ghostly visions. These topics set in play the themes of the subjective, and the scientific/imperial that are further developed throughout the book.

A study of the ways landscape was perceived in nineteenth-century Britain and France, this book draws on evidence from poetry, landscape gardens, spectacular public entertainments, novels and scientific works as well as paintings in order to develop its basic premise that landscape and the processes of perceiving it cannot be separated. Vision embraces panoramic seeing from high places, but also the seeing of ghosts and spectres when madness and hallucination impinge upon landscape. The rise of geology and the spread of empires upset the existing comfortable orders of comprehension of landscape. Reverie and imagination produced powerful interpretive actions, while landscape in French culture proved central to the rejection of conservative classicism in favour of perceptual questioning of experience. The experience of subjectivity proved central to the perception of landscape while the visual culture of landscape became of paramount importance to modernity during the period in question.