English 257a	Stephen Finley
WF 12:30-2:00	HU III

British Topographies, 1790-1914

A study of the intersections of place, locality, topography, cartographies, gardening, self-mapping, self-cancelling, ruin, remembrance, trauma, amid the historical and cultural construction of landscape. One focus of the course will be the English and Scottish borderlands&emdash;Northumbria, Cumbria, the Scottish Borders, and Galloway and Dumfries&emdash;areas marked by centuries of war, uneasily folded, since the 17th-century, within the "union" of Britain. Literary texts will be supplemented by a concern for landscape painting and water-color (Palmer, Turner, Constable, Ruskin), and by a study of the rapid development during the period of the technologies of the illustrated book. The course will begin with a too brief survey of pastoral tradition, including a consideration of the locus amoenus (place of delight), genius loci (spirit of place), and natura codex (book of nature).

Reading List:

Primary:

Ben Jonson "To Penshurst" (1616)

Sir John Denham "Cooper's Hill" (1655)

Andrew Marvell "The Garden" and "Upon Appleton House" (c. 1650's)

Alexander Pope "Windsor Forest" (1713) and "Epistle to Richard Boyle,

Earl of Burlington" (1731)

Thomas Gray "Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard" (1750)

William Wordsworth Selected poems and prefaces

Dorothy Wordsworth Selections from her Journals (1798-1822)

Thomas Carlyle Reminiscences (1881)

Jane Welsh Carlyle Selected letters

Sir Walter Scott Selections from the Journal (1837, 1890)

Marmion (1808)

John, Cardinal Newman Loss and Gain (1848)

Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864)

John Ruskin from Modern Painters, III, IV, and V (1856-1860)

Praeterita (1885-89)

Gerard Manley Hopkins Selected poems (Welsh sonnets of 1877)

Thomas Hardy Poems 1912-1913

Secondary (excerpted studies from the following)&emdash;a partial list:

John Barrell The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840 (1972)

Ann Bermingham Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition (1986)

Cafritz, Gowring, and Rosand Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape (1988)

C. Stephen Finley Nature's Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (1992)

Gerald Finley Landscapes of Memory: Turner as Illustrator to Scott (1980)

Paul Fussell "Arcadian Recourses," from The Great War and

Modern Memory (1975)

Geoffrey Hartman "Marvell, St. Paul, and the Body of Hope" and

"Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci"

Elizabeth Helsinger "Turner and Tradition" and "The Critic's Art," from

Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (1982)

W. G. Hoskins The Making of the English Landscape (1955)

John Dixon Hunt The Figure in the Landscape (1976), and from

Gardens and the Picturesque (1992)

Anne Janowitz England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (1990)

Knoepflmacher and Tennyson, eds. Nature and the Victorian Imagination (1977)

Karl Kroeber Romantic Landscape Vision (1975)

Martin Price "The Picturesque Moment" (1965)

Simon Schama Landscape and Memory (1994)

Christopher Tunnard A World with a View: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scenic Values (1978).

James G. Turner The Politics of Landscape, 1630-1660 (1979)

Course requirements:

Consistent class attendance, in-class writing exercises, two or three shorter papers in response to readings, one topography project (keyed to a local garden, landscape, estate, or ruin), and a comprehensive final exam.