Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts offers probing studies of the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature. Each chapter refines and expands the terms of discussion, and together they enrich the debate with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. To explore the interrelation between our conceptions of nature, beauty and art, the contributors consider the social construction of nature, the determination of our appreciation by artistic media, and the duality of nature’s determining in gardening. Showing that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature, the volume occasions questions of the distinction and relation between art and nature generally, and culminates in a set of philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and emotion in the aesthetic appreciation of nature.

• New paperback edition will be more accessible to students • Distinguished line-up of contributors • Of interest to both philosophers and art historians

1. Nature, fine arts, and aesthetics Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell; 2. Natural beauty without metaphysics T. J. Diffey; 3. Trivial and serious in aesthetic appreciation of nature Ronald W. Hepburn; 4. The public prospect and the private view: the politics of taste in eighteenth-century Britain John Barrell; 5. Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera P. Adams Sitney; 6. The touch of landscape Don Gifford; 7. Desert and ice: ambivalent aesthetics Yi-Fu Tuan; 8. Gardens, earthworks, and environmental art Stephanie Ross; 9. Comparing natural and artistic beauty Donald W. Crawford; 10. Appreciating art and appreciating nature Allen Carlson; 11. The aesthetics of art and nature Arnold Berleant; 12. On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history NoËl Carroll.