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Maria Edgeworth's letter describing her 1833 tour of Connemara in Ireland's wild west has received relatively little critical attention. Yet the letter has the candid spontaneity of writing never intended for publication, revealing a side of Edgeworth rarely glimpsed in her published works. So strong was her childlike curiosity regarding this alien world, which lay just a hundred miles from her home, that Edgeworth, then in her 60s, was willing to brave the inhospitable terrain to see its natural wonders. However, throughout the letter she expresses fear and suspicion of the "natives" whose mediation is necessary for her to access those wonders. To make sense of Connemara's strange landscape and people, Edgeworth deploys three distinct constructions of "nature": a rational nature that had been tamed and rendered productive; a picturesque, commodified nature of discrete sites the burgeoning tourist industry had identified as attractions; and a wild, Romantic nature of mythic prehistory that she longs to experience for herself. As this article argues, each of these "natures" founders in the contact zone, in part because the reality of the region exceeds the interpretive frameworks available to Edgeworth, but also because her own emotional responses defy her attempts at narrative regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of landscape through the lens of performativity, challenging the traditional visual-centric understanding rooted in Western art and culture but without denying the visual and representational character of landscape. It examines the evolution of landscape representation, from its origins in linear perspective and Cartesian dualism to contemporary approaches that integrate performative practices. The analysis highlights the dialectical tension between visual representation and immersive, multisensory experiences, arguing for a more integrated view that acknowledges the performative aspects of the visual. By re-evaluating the role of distance, vision, and representation, the article advocates for a nuanced understanding of landscape that balances the visual with embodied practices, ultimately proposing that landscape should be seen as a dynamic interplay between seeing and performing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms portrays the brutality of the Great War by capturing the beauty of the land and lives that it interrupts and often destroys. Heir to the Romantics, Hemingway shared their love for nature and heroic ideals. Elements of the picturesque movement, a subgenre of Romanticism that focuses on landscape, in American literature can be detected in his scenic descriptions in Farewell. These beautiful scenes when contrasted with the harsh and grotesque tragedies of war provide a compelling illustration of the new modern era. Frederic Henry's description of the front as "picturesque" points to the beauty of Italy, and, ironically, the hideousness of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to examine the entropic landscape in motion that appears in Floating Island by Robert Smithson, a distinguished earth artist active in the 1970s. Floating Island was a temporary artificial mobile island made with earth, rocks, native trees, and shrubs, towed by a tugboat around Manhattan Island. Smithson attempted to combine his artistic imagination with the theory of science, particularly entropy, a pivotal concept in the second law of thermodynamics while also developing an original idea of his own, namely "dialectics of entropic change" that combined entropy with dialectic. He believed that the dialectic could go beyond entropy and reach toward a continuous ever-changing process, which means that "destruction caused by entropy" is not the end of objects as static or discrete but fluctuating and entangled processes. Smithson's concept relates to open systems that are antithetical to closed systems that succumb to entropy. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the meanings of entropic landscape in motion based on Floating Island, for which the artist drew inspiration from dreaming of a "mobile" or "moving" Central Park from the perspective of the dialectic of entropic change. Through the island's movement, which remains elusive from a static viewpoint of a viewer from a central location like Manhattan, Smithson demonstrates how the geopolitical significance and values traditionally ascribed to the city by dichotomous thinking are not immutable truths. The mobility integrated into Floating Island, grounded in the dynamic vitality of nature, draws upon Smithson's innovative dialectics on entropic change, blurring the boundaries between center (life, structure, city, etc.) and periphery (death, debris, island, etc.) through the set of relationships. This offers a meaningful framework for contemplation on sustainability that transcends the boundaries of dichotomous thinking, particularly resonant in today's era confronted with climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of landscape through the lens of performativity, challenging the traditional visual-centric understanding rooted in Western art and culture but without denying the visual and representational character of landscape. It examines the evolution of landscape representation, from its origins in linear perspective and Cartesian dualism to contemporary approaches that integrate performative practices. The analysis highlights the dialectical tension between visual representation and immersive, multisensory experiences, arguing for a more integrated view that acknowledges the performative aspects of the visual. By re-evaluating the role of distance, vision, and representation, the article advocates for a nuanced understanding of landscape that balances the visual with embodied practices, ultimately proposing that landscape should be seen as a dynamic interplay between seeing and performing.

The landscape decision-making system in northwest Wales is insufficiently democratised and the main framings of Eryri (Snowdonia) are grounded in the perception and expectation that it is a sublime, distant and static landscape. Eryri, however, is changing. The landscape of the national park is already being impacted by climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Anticipated future change will also bring the need for further adaptation and transformation in land management. Historic framings of Eryri perpetuate ideologies and ambivalences that have, and could, continue to hamper the much-needed landscape change required to tackle today’s multiple crises. This article explores how past modes of representation, newly specialised industries and government legislation have perpetuated a limited understanding of Eryri. It links the eighteenth-century ‘top-down’, elitist rationalisation of the environment and the legacies of longing to find a ‘truly British’ landscape, with people’s current perceptions and expectations of the landscape. This article begins the journey of exposing the dominant ideologies of landscape, helping to define the underlying problem with the current prevailing framings of the landscape of the national park. It concludes by going beyond defining the problem and proposes an approach to actively reframe Eryri. To do this, it acknowledges the need to empower multiple voices, involving diverse forms of knowledge and incorporating new ways of representation within the landscape decision-making process.

Copyright of XVIIe Siècle is the property of Presses Universitaires de France 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.)

This article examines the pioneering American weird literature writer Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) through the critical lens of the ecogothic, arguing that he resituates the gothic within the real or imagined landscapes of the American frontier, his 'frontier gothic' epitomized by the image of 'the cabin in the woods'. In his writings, the frontier gothic becomes transitional boundary genre on the 'frontier' between the earlier gothic and later folk horror, where not just isolated cabins of lone prospectors, but whole rural communities find themselves in a similarly abject, ruinous moral condition. The liminal 'frontier' nature of the ecogothic is repeated in miniature in the specific way in which abandoned cabins in isolated gulches become ecogothic 'day-old' ruins, quite distinct from a gothic ruin in its lacking civilized boundaries between interior and exterior, culture and nature, epitomized by the image of 'blank windows' and doorless doorways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the remapping of the American landscape as a mass reproducible visual medium onto foreign territories - particularly Afghanistan - during the Cold War. A series of films produced by the US Bureau of Mines and later screened in these territories are the sites of analysis. These films were the source material that applied the American landscape in its many forms, climates and uses to the US's physical infrastructure projects during the time. As sights, these projects of infrastructure building are indicative of the colonial gaze US technicians used to reproduce these landscapes and their underlying systems of power and class around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Jane Austen's network of bodily metaphors in Persuasion, re‐examining 'bloom' in the context of its pair, 'ruin'. While the novel is traditionally understood as a progress narrative that moves from Anne's self‐description as being 'in ruins' to the restoration of her 'bloom', the article examines the inconsistency around Anne's appearance and 'bloom' throughout the novel, contending that rather than presenting a progression, the novel stages the problematics of physiognomy, of reading the body as an index of internal feeling. I argue that by situating Austen's metaphors within context of picturesque writing on ruins and 'roughness' from William Gilpin and Uvedale Price, we can conceive of weathered, worn out, broken, pierced, and ruined bodies as the rough texture that animates Persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While classical ruins are seen as tourist destinations, contemporary or industrial ruins are dismissed as disused sites. In this paper I argue for the preservation of urban (or contemporary) ruins. I focus on one specific case, that of the Miami Marine Stadium in Miami, Florida USA. Since the 1990s the stadium has been derelict, a canvas for graffiti artists and a home to skateboarders. In 2018 the City of Miami decided to revamp the stadium and reopen it as a concert and sporting venue. The current design-development plan has sanitized this urban ruin, robbing it of its past. I will situate the debate about rehabbing contemporary ruins within the growing literature of the neo-picturesque, specifically neo-picturesque landscape design. I believe that urban ruins such as these have a place in the modern city and will suggest some paths forward for these neo-picturesque ruin beauties.

The picturesque refers to an influential genre as well as a critical period during which the aesthetic culture of the Enlightenment was blended to form the Romanticist face of the age. Though it means 'picture-like' etymologically, the picturesque goes beyond being an eye-based scene and covers the other senses while aiming to provide a scenario with multi-sensory experiences for ramblers on site. Regarding this disposition, the picturesque atmosphere denotes a bridge in-between the past and present with its role in the theories of aesthetics. In this framework, this article aims to read the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century picturesque by referring to the phenomenological theories of the spatial atmosphere of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our research demonstrated that the atmosphere of picturesque landscape designs can be conveyed strongly through spatial representations in different art forms. In doing this, the paper proposes the concept of the picturesque atmosphere as a tool to read the spatiality, especially in art branches, mainly including painting. Therefore, a reading model to examine the spatiality in the picturesque paintings was proposed at the end of the paper, by drawing from the theories of both the picturesque and spatial atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between time and architecture in the writings of early theorists of the Picturesque movement in Britain. In doing so, it details how William Gilpin (1724–1804), Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829), and Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824) engaged with processes of decay, accumulation, and historical reflection in their deliberations over how Picturesque scenes were formed. As well as showing how temporality suffused texts which were foundational in defining the Picturesque aesthetic, the article contributes to discussions of how the mutability, duration, and process were expressed and valued in art at the turn of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As opposed to most contemporary usage of the word “picturesque” – which is generally taken to mean visually attractive in a quaint or charming way, or else something that resembles a picture – William Gilpin introduced this term to the English cultural debate in 1792. Gilpin used “picturesque” to typify an aesthetic ideal wherein roughness, raggedness, and ruins would be privileged over smoothness, symmetry and perfection. Over time, his conceptualization of “the picturesque” led to a celebration of disorder, decay, and ruin, a kind of glorification of violence also familiar to the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, following the unimaginable havoc and mass destruction caused by the two world wars, ruins and images of ruins started to be viewed very differently. This paper seeks to explore how the picturesque mode has been used as an instrument of caution in the works of Studio Ghibli, spearheaded by two creative artists and directors, Hayao Miyazaki and Takahata Isao, who have experienced the horrors of WWII firsthand in their own childhoods. This paper specifically looks at two famous anime feature films produced by Studio Ghibli – Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004) – that deal with the impacts of war and convey strong anti-war messages by uniquely employing the picturesque mode of representation.

The paradigms constructing the 18th-century Enlightenment took place simultaneously in many fields. These paradigms mediate the presentations of concepts within a limited framework. The construction of epistemological discourse in architecture occurs with a similar understanding. In the 18th century, excavation of archaeological sites and overseas travels caused an awareness of "other" architectures. However, such encounters shake the basements of the architectural knowledge built on Antiquity. Documentations of these architectures bring about production of knowledge and many issues to the agenda in institutional/theoretical fields not discussed before. Although there are heated debates that can be considered as productive, these encounters inevitably produce paradoxes in architecture and crises in the existing habits and traditional discourses. In this study it is discussed through examples producing time-space paradoxes in architecture and therefore caused situations that can be seen as anti-Enlightenment, such as Alexander Pope, landscape gardens and follies. These were negotiated in a limited framework to be consistent with Enlightenment ideology. For example, discussions about paradoxical situations were rare despite the fact that numerous texts were written on Picturesque, which forms the theoretical basis of this study and takes an important place in 18thcentury architectural historiography. This situation, not coincidentally, confines architecture in a limited frame in a set of such rules. In fact, it is very meaningful to understand the epistemology of these situations in order to scrutinize time-space paradoxes in architecture, differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The landscape decision-making system in northwest Wales is insufficiently democratised and the main framings of Eryri (Snowdonia) are grounded in the perception and expectation that it is a sublime, distant and static landscape. Eryri, however, is changing. The landscape of the national park is already being impacted by climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Anticipated future change will also bring the need for further adaptation and transformation in land management. Historic framings of Eryri perpetuate ideologies and ambivalences that have, and could, continue to hamper the much-needed landscape change required to tackle today's multiple crises. This article explores how past modes of representation, newly specialised industries and government legislation have perpetuated a limited understanding of Eryri. It links the eighteenth-century 'top-down', elitist rationalisation of the environment and the legacies of longing to find a 'truly British' landscape, with people's current perceptions and expectations of the landscape. This article begins the journey of exposing the dominant ideologies of landscape, helping to define the underlying problem with the current prevailing framings of the landscape of the national park. It concludes by going beyond defining the problem and proposes an approach to actively reframe Eryri. To do this, it acknowledges the need to empower multiple voices, involving diverse forms of knowledge and incorporating new ways of representation within the landscape decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lublin Studies in Modern Languages & Literature / Lubelskie Materialy Neofilologiczne is the property of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Department of German & Applied Linguistics 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.)

John Nash was a landscaper and architect who extended the category of the picturesque to urban planning in the early nineteenth century. Using a historicist approach based on archival research and literature review, this article discusses how this theoretical and aesthetic movement influenced the transformation of London through the creation of Regent's Park, St. James's Park and Regent's Street. Its conclusions point to a disruptive but cohesive intervention in the transformation of London, resulting in a new front of urban expansion to the west. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859, scientific explorer of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wrote with a rational mind as well as a romantic spirit. Humboldt's Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799-1804 is a blend of the objective/rational and subjective/romantic, so much so that this work can be considered an early form of science writing in the tradition of literary journalism. Personal Narrative reveals that Humboldt drew on and combined his empirical, rational, and romantic backgrounds to inform and inspire the public and his fellow researchers. The strongest case for Humboldt's work being considered an early form of literary journalism is his consistent use of the picturesque, of which his particular use in Personal Narrative operates at the crossroads between an Age of Reason and Romanticism. In so doing, Humboldt uses the picturesque to entertain as well as inform his audience. Analyses looking for only objectivity, or only subjectivity, in Humboldt's work fall short because he actively uses both in his writing. His scientific philosophy and epistemology create a dynamic feedback loop between objectivity and subjectivity. Further analysis of Humboldt's work as a literary journalistic piece will shed more light on the methodological holism of his epistemology. Recognizing Personal Narrative as an early form of literary journalism opens the door to the works of other authors who were inspired by Humboldt's work to write in ways that could also be considered forms of literary journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the temporality of ephemeral visual posts to social media with an emphasis on Instagram stories. Drawing on theories of the spectacle, it is my contention that interaction and user-experience design, as it pertains to social media platforms, highlights the contemporary conditions and motivations in our society of abundant visual consumption. This article investigates what it means for a social media user to attend to such time-related visual experience. Throughout this piece, I critically survey the relationship between ephemeral Instagram stories’ popularity and the high speed temporality of the social media sphere with emphasis on the digital “picturesque.” Perishable daily sharing on social media reflects a contemplative glimpse into a personal lifespan presented as an object of mass appreciation. I examine how ephemerality as a component of design impacts online sociality through the picturesque visual mode. Contemporary boredom and competitive engagement in high-technological communication networks inform how we might direct digital publics to find alternative pathways to sociality.

Inherently connected to movement and to a sequential spatial experience in time, the picturesque has been considered as a precursor of the cinematic. In addition, the idea of the picturesque is closely connected to Heinrich Wölfflin’s notion of das Malerische or “the painterly,” which stands for a dynamic style of painting characterized by qualities of colour, stroke, and texture rather than of contour or line. Based on the keynote lecture delivered at the conference, The Picturesque: Visual Pleasure and Intermediality in-between Contemporary Cinema, Art and Digital Culture (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, 25–26 October, 2019), 1 the essay disentangles the complex network of connections between image and landscape, painting and film, the picturesque and the painterly.

Within early non-fiction film, the Italian travel or scenic films of the 1910s may be considered the most picturesque. They are remarkable for their presentation of landscapes and cityscapes, their co-existence of modernity and nostalgia, their accent on beauty – at times at the expense of geographic veracity and indexicality – and their focus on the transformed gaze through the use of special masks, split-screens, and other devices. The transmedial roots for this aestheticization can be found both in art (painting) and popular culture (postcards, magic lanterns, etc.). While the author was one of the firsts to write on this subject decades ago, today there is a need for radical revision and a deeper approach. This is due to the influx of recent literature first by Jennifer Peterson’s book Education in the School of Dreams (2013) and her scholarly articles. Secondly, Blom’s co-presentation on Italian early nonfiction at the 2018 workshop A Dive into the Collections of the Eye Filmmuseum: Italian Silent Cinema at the Intersection of the Arts led to the recognition that revision was needed. Finally, the films themselves call for new approaches while they are being preserved and disseminated by, foremost, the film archives of Bologna, Amsterdam, and Turin.

The 18th-century notion of the picturesque is somewhat lesser known as compared to the more celebrated categories of the beautiful and the sublime, even though it may not only help us critically reflect upon modern perceptions of the landscape, but it may also provide us a unique way to link the field of aesthetic speculation with questions of technology and economy. The article will focus on two of the major theoreticians of the picturesque (William Gilpin and Uvedale Price) and will examine their ideas in relation to Edmund Burke’s aesthetics on the one hand, and contemporary tendencies in landscape gardening (as represented by Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton) on the other. Such an investigation may shed light on the multiple shifts in the perception of nature and the sense of naturalness during the long 18th century, as well as on the pictorial and theatrical aspects of landscape design. But examples of the Claude glass, the ha-ha, and Humphry Repton’s Red Books may also indicate the role of technological innovations and economic interests, and thereby the relevancy of the very discourse of the picturesque to more modern or even postmodern artistic, cultural, and medial developments.

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) toured the English Midlands in summer 1830. An outcome of the journey was a watercolour now in the collection of the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral, entitled Dudley, Worcestershire (Figure 1). A version of the same scene attributed to Turner entitled Lime Kilns with Dudley Castle (Figure 2) was bequeathed to the Dudley Art Gallery in 1947 by Henry Pearman Bagott (1861–1946), a Dudley solicitor. The provenance of the watercolours is considered in the light of questions posed by the re-discovery of a catalogue of the collection of Dr George Charles Williamson (1858–1942), a previous owner of the latter version. The catalogue links Turner's relationship with the Birmingham-born artist, David Cox (1783–1859) to the involvement of the Wolverhampton industrialist, Laurence William Hodson (1864–1933), and forms the basis for possible further research on the provenance of the versions of Turner's watercolours of Dudley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that landscape is an instrument that travel writer and amateur artist and botanist Maria Graham uses to accentuate the momentous changes she witnesses during and after the Brazilian independence movement. Rather than being a background, landscape is a tool with which she inscribes the scene of Brazilian independence. Her self-awareness as a privileged British citizen leads her to champion a political movement that valorizes the mythology of innate British liberty, and landscape serves as an ideal medium through which to channel this conviction. Her 1824 Journal of a Voyage to Brazil demonstrates a way of looking at South American land that articulates a harmony between its natural and political structures; her construction of the Brazilian landscape orders it so as to align the natural and political environments. At the same time, her work bears witness to the discursive processes that forge the ever-unstable binary oppositions of nature and culture, aesthetics and politics.

In 1682, La Salle claimed for France all the countries watered by the Mississippi and named them Louisiana. Over the next century, as published accounts of this territory proliferated in the Atlantic world, it was described simultaneously as a "New Eden" and an "impassable morass," while colonial observers also speculated about its potential as a pastoral middle ground. Freely adapting such accounts into his own prose, Chateaubriand composed in Atala, ou les amours de deux savages dans le désert (1801) a likewise ambivalent picture of the region. This essay locates the novella at a narrative intersection of several of these descriptive accounts and argues that it provides a literary node for examining the hemispheric text-network that documented and translated Louisiana's settlement within an uneasy, yet increasingly coherent wetlands discourse. This process of translation is linguistic, as English and Spanish editions of Atala began circulating soon after its publication, but it is also the founding matter of the novella. While a landmark of French fiction, Atala 's aesthetic appeal cannot be uncoupled from the environmental and topographical specificity of its source material, and in this light the novella is also an early American text in translation, one that is itself a melancholy document of the colonial project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Topiques, Études Satoriennes is the property of Topiques, Études Satoriennes, Journal of the SATOR (Société d'Analyse la Topique Romanesque) 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.)

The present article purports to locate Gray’s and Wordsworth’s journals in a transnational culture, which culminates with Humboldt, whose effort was to combine scientific and poetic language in the discovery of landscape. The two poets shared scientific interests, which they show not only in their lexical choice but also in the reproduction of their experience of the territory, based on the material circumstances of their apprehension of reality. Historical studies in the natural sciences enabled them to perceive phenomenons. Still, their pictorial sensibility and mastery of the language gave them the tools useful to communicate the uniqueness of the re-discovery of familiar paths, meadows and mountains.

Copyright of Strategic Universe Journal / Univers Strategic is the property of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Institute for Security 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.)

Jemima Marchioness Grey (1722‐1797) was an avid country‐house tourist in the mid‐eighteenth century, and her accounts offer a key insight into emerging debates around garden design and the picturesque. This article will explore Grey's engagement with garden theory through her contrasting accounts of Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, arguing that her insights can enrich our understanding of emerging discourses and showcase the way in which women can provide some of the most enlightening accounts that frame them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in travel writing, postcolonialism, and landscape politics. However, studies of travel writing addressing the notion of the picturesque have not yet explored the idea of aesthetic sensibility in British travel narratives in the Regency of Tunis. This article examines the aesthetics of the picturesque in three British travel accounts: Grenville Temple's Excursions in the Mediterranean: Algiers and Tunis (1835); Robert Lambert Playfair's Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce in Algeria and Tunis (1877); and Henry Spencer Ashbee and Alexander Graham's Travels in Tunisia (1887). These travelers used the picturesque in different but interlinked ways; they oscillated between finding the uncanny landscape an object of delight where it conformed to British aesthetic doctrine and an object of derision where they noted aesthetic deficiencies. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this picturesque way of seeing shifted into an Orientalist desire for "Otherness". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]