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The new sciences of medical geography and topography developed at the end of the eighteenth century and coincided with the literary and artistic fashion for the picturesque representation of landscape. This article explores the relationship between medical geography and the literary picturesque in the colonial Caribbean. It argues that literature and medicine borrowed formal and thematic qualities from one another, and reveals the influence of aesthetic ideals on the production of medical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance of Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford as an important nineteenth-century manor house in the Scottish 'Baronial' style is rarely contested. The complexity of the property's development, however, has left open important questions about its history. In the main, previous studies of Abbotsford have shown a slow evolution from the original farmhouse on the estate through several stages until the main structure as it existed in Scott's lifetime was completed in 1825. What has now become more clearly visible, however, is the fact that for at least the first year after the purchase of the property in June 1811 Scott was aiming to build his residence on fresh ground immediately adjacent to the Tweed, according to plans commissioned from the eminent Glasgow architect William Stark. Using a range of archival material from the period - some newly discovered - this paper traces Scott's plan to build his 'cottage' by the Tweed, from the inception of the scheme in the summer of 1811 until its effectual abandonment after 1812. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the architectural effects of literary place-making on historic monuments through the example of Robert Burns's poem Tam o' Shanter and the scene of its main action, Old Alloway Kirk. The background to antiquarian representation of the monument - with particular reference to Francis Grose's contribution - and its re-imagining by Burns is discussed along with the church's early designation as an ancient monument by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how the 1782 book "Observations on the River Wye" by William Gilpin influenced violence in Ceylon from 1796 through 1818 during the years of the British consolidating colonial power from the former Dutch colonial administration. It considers how the notion of the picturesque shaped British travel accounts. Also considered are the illustrated books "A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China," by artists Thomas and William Daniell, and "Journal of a Residence in India" by Maria Graham.

The article considers how science influenced British literature of the 18th- and 19th-centuries by considering the 1801 book "Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement," by John Thelwall. It explores how topographical studies of the Wye River Valley, especially the area between Chepstow and Tintern Abbey in England, helped shift historical perception of the picturesque. Other books considered include "Historical Tour in Monmouthshire" by William Coxe, "Anecdotes of British Topography, or, an historical account of what has been done for illustrating the topographical antiquities of Great Britain" by Richard Gough, and "Observations on the River Wye. . . Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty" by William Gilpin. Other topics include antiquarians, Romantic poet William Wordsworth, natural history, and travel writing.

The essay recounts an April 1795 outing to picturesque locales in England made by English author and bookseller Joseph Cottle with Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and the Fricker sisters, Sara and Edith, the women who respectively became the wives of Coleridge and Southey. The outing began in Bristol, stopping at the Beaufort Arms in Chepstow for lunch, with walks through the Piercefield estate in the afternoon. On the way to Tintern to view Tintern Abbey and have dinner, the party got lost in the dark.

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The aim of this paper is not to focus on a particular thematic issue of Aesthetics, offering an exhaustive approach of it, but to display a broader map allowing to capture the essence of this topic from an overall perspective. To achieve it, I have paid attention to a number of points that will help to place Aesthetics in historical terms in the context of 18th century Great Britain. In this vein, I have addressed certain pillars deemed crucial in understanding Aesthetics, such as the socio-historical background in which it emerged, the meaning of this field of study, its main theoreticians and its three most important aesthetic categories. Finally, I close the paper by drawing some brief conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Following the positioning of the narrator in the center of the biographical ego by placing him in the Calidor, the study aims to illustrate an Edenic space from the image of an idyllic Bessarabia, nostalgically regarded as an "opposite pole of the destructive present". Perceiving the world through the sensoriality and integrating into the fabulous existentialism, the narrator replaces perception with admiration, and taking possession of the childhood is carried out by colors, smells and seasons. Creating a small space, Paul Goma does not display it in all its beauty, building it under the open sky, in the open space of the Calidor where, on the first place there is, as it should be for all establishments of this kind, the system of family links. According to the tradition established by Ion Creanga, the author builds fabulous characters, memorable through the magical force of telling stories or working in the household. The preference for puns, for playfulness and for dialectical vocabulary creates the atmosphere, shrouding the writing in a magical space where subtle irony, intertext, free humor are not missing. Recalling the poetic of dionysiac holidays, laughter and joy now give to the writing a Carnival frankness, anchoring it in a strong tradition of Romanian folklore. Being valued in a feminine way through the very symbol around which the whole book is centered, The Calidor is tied to the male spirit only at its historical level, building his happy childhood world not in its reality, but rather ideally restoring it. Thus, wishing to include everything, the Calidor represents the beginning, but at the same time, the continuity of the beginning (another beginning), becoming a sacred source of smooth vocalities, bathed in the inexhaustible holy oil of the speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial designer Russel Wright's final gesamtkunstwerk, Manitoga, has received scant attention from landscape theorists or historians. Constructed during the 1950s, Manitoga comprises Wright's house, studio, and a 75-acre woodland garden in the Hudson River Valley near Garrison, New York. The project was the culmination of a design practice that extended from Wright's initial work as a theater and industrial designer, to encompass a complete lifestyle and unique proto-ecological vision. In addition to Wright's holistic approach to design, encompassing product, interior, architectural, and landscape design, Manitoga's idiosyncratic yet provocative blend of picturesque and Japanese garden traditions dramatizes the fundamental and ongoing relationship between culture and nature, and make it a site worth revisiting from a landscape design perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are various ways of paying tribute to an individual artist like the writer Vilém Mrštík (1863-1912), to whom the current publication is devoted. The author of this article has chosen to trace stylistic features in the novel-chronicle Rok na vsi (A year in a village, 1903-04). It was written mainly by Vilém's brother Alois (1861-1925), nevertheless, Vilém encouraged and advised Alois, contributing ocassionally to the text. Thus, some of its qualities may be attributed to himself or his possible influence upon the work. The idea of stylistic 'blow-ups' comes from an inspiring work by the literary scholar Zdeněk Kožmín (1925-2007): the analyses presented in the individual sections focus on a single quality of the text, such as impressionist 'sensationism' (a preference for sensorial data), the wandering glance of the narrator-beholder, the relation of a particular action and general activities, or the relation of the atmosphere of the landscape and the mood of the narrator - all of which are displayed in analyzing the particular linguistic and stylistic tools employed to represent them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines William Wordsworth's A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, a text that has conventionally been seen as an exemplary work of place writing. Building on recent studies of place in Wordsworth's works, and place within Romanticism more generally, this essay argues that the Guide's “sense of place” is fundamentally relational. The Guide aims to situate the Lakes within an imaginary network of global natures, positioning the region as an alternative to other natural settings – such as the Alps – and not simply as an alternative to the city. To accomplish this goal, Wordsworth defines taste as the ability to appreciate key differences between scenic settings. The Guide thereby challenges the cultural practices associated with eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century tourism, which tended to emphasize the similarities between “picturesque” landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the landscape management and development of Clumber Park, England from circa 1760 to circa 1861. Particular focus is given to the role that the Dukes of New Castle-under-Lyne, England, including the ninth Earl of Lincoln, England Henry Fiennes Clinton, played in Clumber Park's landscape design. The landscape painter and gardener, who is referred to as a pioneer of the picturesque, William Sawrey Gilpin's impact of Clumber Park's landscape design, including on its terraces, its allegedly picturesque attributes and the grouping of its trees, is discussed.

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This article analyses the little studied development of Jerusalem's ‘Holy Basin’ in its religious, intellectual and urban history. The Holy Basin is a geographical zone surrounding and including the historic Old City of Jerusalem; together, basin and walled enclosure contain the majority of sites holy to Islam, Judaism and Christianity in the city. In recent times, the concept has become central to planning policy and political interests. The Holy Basin is also seen increasingly as the crux not only of how the city is contested, but more generally of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Jerusalem's status within the proposed two-state solution. Rather than a discussion of the current politics of the Basin, this article focuses on how imperialist and Romantic conceptions of landscape from the nineteenth century influenced the conservation and planning of Jerusalem throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. The example of Jerusalem shows how Western conservation practices and perceptions of ‘sacred space’, first introduced by the British, profoundly altered not just the urban fabric but also the very understanding of the role and integration of the historic parts of the city with modern Jerusalem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aims of this study1 are theoretical and comparative. It contains a theoretical section describing the 18th and 19th centuries visions of the Middle Ages (admirable, critical and indifferent). Then, the relationships with the European romantics, including the Catalans, are studied. The folkloric and nationalism are presented as bridges between the two epochs. The history of the 17th and 18th centuries Picturesque is reviewed and a new view of it is presented. Instead of conceiving it as a minor aesthetic, I propose it as a precedent for the avant-garde given its defence of the irregular and the badly done. Furthermore, the 19th century idea of paradise lost was conceptualised around four axes (past, infancy, nature and art) and I propose a fifth (ethnicity)2 for the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII, Historia del Arte is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In A View of the Writers' Building from the Monument at the West End (1824–1826), James Baillie Fraser depicted the memorial to the Black Hole of Calcutta in ruins before the pristine Georgian façades of the Writers' Building and Saint Andrew's Church. Erected in 1760, the monument commemorated the British citizens who suffocated in a cell after they were captured by the Nawab of Bengal in 1756. Significantly, while earlier British representations present the monument as a marker of the origins of Britain's dominion over Calcutta, Fraser's image of the memorial is far more ambiguous. In Fraser's aquatint, its representation as a picturesque ruin appears to impinge on the very status of Holwell's monument as a memorial. Situated before the buildings that symbolise Britain's power and progress in Calcutta, the decaying monument troubles the scene by recalling the fraught nature of British hegemony in a city poised to become the capital of British India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1768, William Aislabie purchased an estate neighbouring his own that included the ruins of Fountains Abbey, and proceeded to clear and reorganise the ruins to emphasise them as the subject of a Picturesque view. His intervention resulted in significant critical objection, but the basis of this objection shifted substantially over the ensuing decades. In the 1770s, William Gilpin's objections were founded in ideas of the ‘authentic’ Gothic ruin, a late-eighteenth-century concept based on the building's Picturesque qualities and evocation of mood; in the 1840s, John Walbran's criticism was based on a new concept of ruins derived from empirical examination that valued the original fabric of the building as documentary evidence. The changing concept of ruins exemplifies the shift in the perception of the Gothic, as antiquarian investigation transformed it from a fashionable, private mode of building that was perceived as irrational and disorderly to a principled, moral and public style. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Romanian Review of Eurasian Studies / Revista Română de Studii Eurasiatice is the property of Romanian Review of Eurasian Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

No serious work has examined the history of the Post Office Tower, although recently it has figured in popular architecture and design journalism. Thus, Jonathan Glancey and Stephen Bayley have both referred to the tower’s significance in the 1960s and interpreted it as a symbol of the technological modernization of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ of the ‘scientific revolution’. This article acknowledges that the Post Office Tower’s modernity is central to any interpretation but argues that white heat explanations are problematic and that its evolving design and public meaning were shaped by a wide range of factors, long preceding the 1960s Labour government, and are best understood in the context of an earlier and more protracted history. This historical context was the contested modernity of the late 1950s and issues around planning, landscape, popular access and democratic citizenship with their origins in the early post-war period. The latter issues are examined through debates about picturesque theory and through Adrian Forty’s discussion of welfare state architecture and the Festival Hall. It is argued that this focus reveals underlying but previously neglected aspects of the Post Office Tower’s design history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay considers Moscow's simultaneously peripheral and central position on the global fashion map. It is predicated on a study of imaginary Russian geographies presented in Vogue and other fashion media, advertisements and promotional activities by important fashion brands, as well as the promotional texts and visuals of several new Russian fashion designers. While these different players all contribute to shaping the imagery of Russian fashion today, their agendas and aesthetics differ. This essay identifies three main approaches within the field of the symbolic production of Russian fashion. Western fashion designers and fashion media mainly rely on Russian imperial sartorial heritage in their orientalizing approach to Russian fashion. Secondly, Russian Vogue perpetuates Moscow's peripheral international fashion position either by passively transmitting derivative Western representations of Russianness, or by reconstructing its own high-fashion versions of traditional Russian decorative style. Finally, several young Russian fashion designers deconstruct both traditional Russian and socialist iconography, in a fundamentally new development for the country's fashion scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many in the field of Indian photography are aware of the photographs John Edward Saché produced in India, little has been written about his career. Almost nothing was known about this practitioner, whose biographical details were confused with various firms - Saché & Westfield, Saché & Murray, Saché & Lawrie and Saché & Co. - and with various other names - J. Saché and A. Saché - appearing on photographs or in trade directories. Saché followed the steps of the well-known English photographer Samuel Bourne, who had set up a paradigm for composing landscape and architectural views, in which the picturesque vocabulary dominated. A master of the Picturesque, Saché excelled in this style, offering astonishing views that have often been attributed to Bourne. This essay will present the photographic career of Saché and compare the work of both practitioners in order to delineate the extents to which Saché reproduced Bourne's formula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a brief thumbnail sketch of how Irish poetry has situated "nature" inside its competing narrative forms. Beginning with Irish poetry's earliest lyrics and concluding with some of Ireland's most recent, and most experimental, writers, the goal of the piece is to introduce some rudimentary eco-critical theory as a means of better understanding how nature acts as a complex cultural and political semiotic, so often overlooked, in Irish literature. En route, the article examines and in part deconstructs those critical categories that have often divided Irish literature into two distinct ecological camps: the picturesque (read colonialist/tourist) and the oral (read native/indigenous). The article also considers the importance of ecofeminist theory and asks how critics might better read Ireland's women poets as nature poets in their own right. In closing, the piece turns its attention to a number of recent poets, both men and women, who have exceeded the picturesque/oral divide and now require eco-alternative readings of nature as we enter the second decade of the 21st Century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay endeavours to account for the originality of Wordsworth's early poems and their conception of landscape. This includes ascertaining what "the picturesque" may have meant for Wordsworth beyond his later repudiations of the notion, but also analysing his early poetry as resulting from a collision between "picturesque" and "georgic" influences and imperatives. Wordsworth's later poetics of place thus appears as first emerging from the problems and contradictions of 18th century poetry and aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this paper I want to scrutinize one of the key ideas within modern Western aesthetics. Beauty is often considered to derive from a virtuous disinterested attitude towards nature. This kind of view has been advocated by thinkers such as Shaftesbury and Kant in the beginning of the so-called aesthetic turn in philosophy. The problem with this view is that it presupposes that nature exists by itself before human intervention in a kind of ideal pristine state. My hypothesis is that this ideal of pristine nature constitutes one of the underlying problems of many contemporary environmental discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the private journals of George Augustus Robinson as a lens, this paper is concerned with generating insights into the emergence of tourism in colonial Victoria, during what Towner calls its ‘tourism era of discovery’. Robinson was the Chief Protector of Aborigines and is generally regarded as the most travelled man in Victoria in the 1840s. Robinson was reconstructed as a ‘nascent tourist’ whose gaze was mediated by British conventions of the picturesque and panoramic, confirming that new world tourism in Australia in the nineteenth century is rendered in old world paradigms. The role played by private landholders in creating ‘nascent private tourism’ and the nexus between explorers, travellers and tourists were also highlighted. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since aesthetic experience is vital for the protection of nature, I address the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmentalism. I first review two traditional positions, the picturesque approach and formalism. Some environmentalists fault the modes of aesthetic appreciation associated with these views, charging they are anthropocentric, scenery-obsessed, superficial, subjective, and/or morally vacuous. In light of these apparent failings of traditional aesthetics of nature, I suggest five requirements of environmentalism: that aesthetic appreciation of nature should be acentric, environment-focused, serious,objective and morally engaged. I then examine two contemporary positions concerning appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature, the aesthetics of engagement and scientific cognitivism, assessing each in terms of the requirements of environmentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Parc de Bercy may be interpreted in light of the descriptive name given its design by creators Bernard Huet, Marylène Ferrand, Jean-Pierre Feugas. Ian Le Caisne. and Philippe Raguin. Constructed on the former site of wine warehouses in southeast Paris as "Jardin de la mémoire," Its elements refer to the history of its site. Its ruins and restored buildings blend with contemporary features, suggesting a process originating in philosopher Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory. Benjamin linked the accumulation and perception of meaning in ruin and allegorical devices in such a way that allegorical ruin not only catalyzes nostalgic memory but also opens a path to future meaning. Philosopher Jean Lauxerois has addressed the melancholic strain of allegorical ruin in relation to gardens, while literary critic Craig Owen has offered updated formulation of Benjamin's understanding of allegory's creative potential, This Interpretation of the ruins and by extension the entire park as allegory reveals both its focus on remembering and Its openness to new accumulations of meaning and history. Its design process likewise may be considered an allegorical effort to bring forth new meanings based on preexisting detail. French landscape theorist Sébastien Marot's concept of phenomenal transparency supports this view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Taj complex was built in the mid-17th century, the mausoleum has been an object of wonder and delight, yet viewed differently by each era. The Mughal emperors saw it from across the river Yamuna, reflected in the river's waters and in the fountains of Mahtab Bagh, and framed by the balconies of the Red Fort. The Europeans painted, photographed, and made it an object of romantic gaze in a picturesque setting that fitted their notions of the exotic and mysterious East. The post-colonial period has seen proliferations of its image for virtual consumption and commodification, making the Taj the most visited tourist destination in India. Today, the Taj complex is a tourist enclave that is cut off from its surroundings, and limited movement patterns restrict visitor views and experiences of the monument. This article proposes that ways of seeing the building should include perceiving it as a "figure in the landscape." "Landscape" is understood to be not just the neocolonial version of the Mughal garden that dominates the foreground of the Taj's ubiquitous imagery, but also the larger cultural landscape of the river Yamuna and its flood plain, rural hamlets and farmfields, and the streets and open spaces of urban Agra. By knitting together the public gardens, parks, and other landscapes in a continuous system of open spaces, a green belt can be created around the Taj to protect it from environmental pollution and provide recreational spaces. View corridors proposed in this landscape will function as conservation easements and will engage the visitor in an extended visual experience of the Taj. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the tradition of landscape traced back to the emergence of landscape painting, the techniques of art provided the basis for selecting a vantage point or prospect, from which to view the landscape, and for framing the scene. Meanwhile, the development of aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, beautiful, picturesque, and romantic provided the means of evaluating landscape scenery. These concepts provided a highly structured way of seeing intended to standardize the experience of landscape and remove the personal response. The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends of landscape appreciation based on the use of these four aesthetic concepts in the case study of the British West Indies during the formative years of tourism between 1815 and 1914. In travel narrative descriptions of landscape experiences, writers continued to use each of the terms: sublime, beautiful, picturesque, and romantic. However, with increasing emphasis on personal experience and emotional response, these terms were used less to depict specific types or characteristics of landscape than to generally indicate the sensibility of an attractive landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article approaches the picturesque style in the city of Mar del Plata, in its urban an landscape scale. It means that the released of a " picturesque town" for the holidays, half way through the twentieth century, was the result of the private strategies in its homes, its parks and gardens. In the beginning, it was about little "villas", fantastic cottages lately; to arrive — in the middle of the twenties — to a type of smaller cottages where the language presents a strong image of rusticity. In the meantime, the public strategies itself, headed to the construction of new parks, townsquares an "landscape shelves" which, in first place, "artificializes" the geography and lately, in the thirties, raised the issue of the "return to nature" in the way to a new reading of the seaside town, like a potential "garden city". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The architectural and urban patrimony implies the appreciation of the monuments and the diverse contextual and intangible inheritance that builds the past and present of the cities. In this sense, Mar del Plata possesses a modest patrimony predominantly constituted by "Mar del Plata style" chalets. These dwellings, which acme is set between 1930 and 1950, shape the principal identifiable aspect of the city. In order to comprehend its value, it is essential to research in its material, social and urban evolutionary genesis. Hence, it will be a revision of the picturesque, particularly in its passage from the cultured facets to the popular ones, together with a marplatense social-urban historical analysis. So, from villas and chalets to the modest "Mar del Plata style" chalets, it will be analyzed the value of this last picturesque link with the aid of oral, bibliographic and photographic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of archive crucially informs my thesis on images of Islam in South African media and culture. In repositories of authoritative texts the thesis tracked the dynamics that render Islam visible in South Africa. I examined official and parallel archives, finding images of Islam in overlooked and insignificant places such as cookbooks, jokes and stories and, through them, explored interior and resistant meanings. In the thesis I analysed novels, paintings, plays and poetry, and examined the patterns and emphases in the visual repositories on Islam in the South African National Library and the catalogue of the Museum Africa in Johannesburg. I looked also at what is lacking from such archives, conducting what Martin Hall called an 'archaeology of absences'. I pointed to the existence of alternative archives of Islam in South Africa generated through forms of self-organization such as mosques that developed parallel and in opposition to official colonial institutions. Beyond documents, I accessed through interviews more evanescent occurrences such as jokes, visiting customs and burial rituals. Through interviews as well as analyses of recipe books I explored practices surrounding food. I offered these different ways of speaking about Islam not as the 'true story' but to show what lies beyond the view of Islam as picturesque and exotic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on British and other landscape painting, as well as the travel writings of such people as Mary Graham, governess to the Emperor D. Pedro's daughter, this article examines representations of Brazil by Europeans in the early nineteenth century. It finds that the images created were not a neutral reflection of the exotic, but a complex reception based upon a wide variety of prior influences, amongst them the tradition of the grand tour, the Arcadian ideal, the concept of the picturesque, and scientific theories of Nature, such as Humboldt's. Nevertheless, the encounter with Brazil involved a true exchange of ideas, not only bringing European tastes such as the country garden to Brazil, but also taking back to Europe new images of the tropics, making this, as the author calls it, a 'two-way street'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aesthetic category of "picturesque" was incorporated in the conceptual repertoire of artists and art theorists during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Its content has always had an unstable character. Initially, its meaning alluded to a particular way of seeing and seizing nature, following classic artists" composition canons. Later, it was used in a more comprehensive sense as a form of perception and recording of reality in different fields. This article studies the different connotations that "picturesque" had for travelers that followed the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt. By examining the work of J.M. Rugendas, it is possible to observe that aesthetic categories played an essential role in linking art work and scientific exploration projects in the American continent during the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ler Historia is the property of Ler Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

France is characterised by strong centralisation that is generally hostile towards differences. Yet, it is one of the countries where architectural regionalism is expressed with the most vigour. One could interpret this phenomenon as a reaction against the system of standardisation. However, a close analysis of the conditions in which these buildings were produced indicates that, on the contrary, encouraging regionalism could be a strategy of the central power—the latter aimed at dissimulating, behind a deceitful decoration, its continuous effort of levelling the authentic differences which, nevertheless, persist. Versailles could represent a relevant metaphor for understanding this paradox: the irreproachable ordonnance of the garden à la française is untarnished by the intrusion of the picturesque hamlet of Trianon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses recent work in the central Lake District to explore current approaches to prehistoric landscapes in Britain. It argues that those approaches owe much to ways of seeing, which have their roots in the Romantic tradition, in particular, a tendency to privilege vision over the other senses. The more recent history of the area is drawn upon to argue for approaches which deal more directly with the physical engagement with landscape at varied scales. Such an approach has implications for the ways that the area has been, and remains, caught up in discourses of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landscape has recently achieved a broad intellectual prominence as a theoretical concept across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Its complex roots and meanings are scrutinized with particular attention given to the pictorial and scenic aspects of landscape, which are here historicized in relation to processes of cultural modernization. Landscape's roots in territorially based community governed by customary law have never been wholly destroyed and an analysis of the evolution of landscapes in Southern California suggests that they are being recovered in certain respects in the context of hypermodernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tension between the rural environment as the lived experience of those who dwell within it, and the objectification of that environment as scenery, is examined in the context of a change in planning legislation and philosophy. A discursive analysis of relevant documents demonstrates the application of a strong picturesque aesthetic. While the process of expert landscape assessment, as undertaken in this case study, immediately establishes a tension between outsider and insider, expert and inhabitant, the application of the picturesque aesthetic exacerbates it. In addition, the conflation of scenic quality with ecological health, which is an implicit feature of the picturesque aesthetic, results in a failure to adequately protect significant ecosystems as required under New Zealand's new planning law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]