Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830

Rachel Crawford examines the intriguing, often problematic, relationship between poetry and landscape in eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain. Crawford focuses on the gradual change during this period when the British taste for open space gradually gave way to a preference for confined space, so that by the beginning of the Regency period contained sites, both topographical and poetic, were perceived to express authentic English qualities. In this context, Crawford discusses the highly fraught parliamentary enclosure movement which closed off the last of England’s open fields between 1760 and 1815. Crawford takes enclosure as a prevailing metaphor for a reconceptualization of the aesthetics of space in which enclosed and confined sites became associated with productivity, and sets explicit images, such as the apple, the iron industry, and the kitchen garden within the context of georgic and minor lyric poetry.

• An innovative approach to the landscape and poetry in eighteenth-century England • Focuses on cultural images and issues rarely discussed in connection with poetry • Well illustrated volume

List of illustrations; Part I. Representational Spaces: Introduction: expansion and contraction; 1. Codifying containment: the parliamentary enclosures; 2. Altering the prospects: Switzer, Whately, and Repton; Part II. The Poetry of Earth: 3. English Georgic and British nationhood; 4. Philips’s Cyder: Englishing the apple; 5. Jago’s Edge-Hill: simulation and representation; Part III. Infinitude Confined: 6. Lyric art; 7. The kitchen garden manual; 8. The poetics of the bower: Keats, Coleridge, and Hemans; Conclusion; Bibliography.

\'Crawford\'s argument yields surprising and productive conclusions. By liberally mixing resources currently constrained within separate academic disciplines, Crawford\'s work will open up vaster fields of knowledge for readers, challenging the assumptions of literary history with those of agricultural history and vice versa.\' The Agricultural History Review