Landscape, liberty and authority: poetry, criticism and politics from Thomson to Wordsworth

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.