Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 Samuel Johnson and Languages of Natural Description

Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the "long" eighteenth century. Landscape has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of eighteenth-century English culture; this book surveys those debates and offers a provocative new account. 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" eighteenth-century.

Robert J. Mayhew is a Lecturer in Historical Geography at Aberystwyth University, Wales.