Helsinger Rural Scenes and National Representation

Britain, 1815-1850
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6437-9
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Legacy Library

Elizabeth Helsinger's iconoclastic book explores the peculiar power of rural England to stand for conflicting ideas of Britain. Despite the nostalgic appeal of Constable's or Tennyson's rural scenes, they record the severe social and economic disturbances of the turbulent years after Waterloo. Artists and writers like Cobbett, Clare, Turner, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot competed to claim the English countryside as ideological ground. No image of rural life produced consensus over the great questions: who should constitute the nation, and how should they be represented? Helsinger ponders how some images of rural life and land come to serve as national metaphors while others challenge their constructions of Englishness at the heart of the British Empire.

Drawing on recent work in social history, nationalism, and geography, as well as the visual and literary arts, Helsinger recovers other possible and alternative readings of social ties embedded in the imagery of land. She reflects on the power of rural images to transfer local loyalties to the national scene, first popularizing then institutionalizing them. By turning a critical gaze on these scenes, she comments on the difference between art and ideology, and the problems and dangers of asserting any kind of national identity through imagery of the land.

Originally published in 1996.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Helsinger, Elizabeth K.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

INTRODUCTION Land and the Nation 3

PART I: ICONS AND AUDIENCES

CHAPTER ONE Constable: The Making of a National Painter 41

CHAPTER TWO Out of the Heart of the Country: Tennyson's English Idyls 65

PART II: CONTESTED GROUND

CHAPTER THREE Cobbett's Radical Husbandry 103

CHAPTER FOUR Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet 141

CHAPTER FIVE Turner's England and Wales 162

CHAPTER SIX Bronte's Ghosts 175

RETROSPECT Eliot's Risky History 217

NOTES 239

INDEX 283