Landscape Liberty and Authority

Tim Fulford examines landscape description in the writings of Thomson Cowper Johnson Gilpin Repton Wordsworth Coleridge and others. He shows how landscape description formed part of a larger debate over the nature of liberty and authority in a Britain developing its sense of nationhood and reveals the tensions that arose as writers sought to define their relationship to the public sphere. Fulford''s innovative study offers a new view of literary and political influence linking the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.