”Vile Things”; William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque
”Vile Things”; William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque
This essay explores the picturesque writer William Gilpin’s problematic relationship with English gardens. While his earliest works seem to champion the landscape garden as a great national art, the manuscripts for his picturesque tours are full of sharp criticisms and withering insults aimed at both gardens and their owners. Set alongside the published tours, a close reading of the deletions and rephrasing in these manuscripts helps us to see both Gilpin’s desire for landscape as a cue for imaginative reverie and his unease about a landowning vision of nature. Gilpin’s writings are often caricatured as the visions of a dissociated traveller, but his manuscripts insist on the immediacy of shifting emotional states.
Gilpin, Picturesque, landscape, gardens, eighteenth century
Bending, Stephen
eb2c0b50-2fe4-4ebe-8958-fc5a88ca2bfb
1 December 2017
Bending, Stephen
eb2c0b50-2fe4-4ebe-8958-fc5a88ca2bfb
Bending, Stephen
(2017)
”Vile Things”; William Gilpin and the Properties of the Picturesque.
Huntington Library Quarterly, 80 (4).
(doi:10.1353/hlq.2017.0032).
Abstract
This essay explores the picturesque writer William Gilpin’s problematic relationship with English gardens. While his earliest works seem to champion the landscape garden as a great national art, the manuscripts for his picturesque tours are full of sharp criticisms and withering insults aimed at both gardens and their owners. Set alongside the published tours, a close reading of the deletions and rephrasing in these manuscripts helps us to see both Gilpin’s desire for landscape as a cue for imaginative reverie and his unease about a landowning vision of nature. Gilpin’s writings are often caricatured as the visions of a dissociated traveller, but his manuscripts insist on the immediacy of shifting emotional states.
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In preparation date: 2017
Submitted date: 2017
Accepted/In Press date: 6 November 2017
e-pub ahead of print date: 1 December 2017
Published date: 1 December 2017
Keywords:
Gilpin, Picturesque, landscape, gardens, eighteenth century
Organisations:
English
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Local EPrints ID: 410660
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/410660
ISSN: 0018-7895
PURE UUID: a9883fce-8347-4937-bde2-c88b7cf90227
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Date deposited: 09 Jun 2017 09:19
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 05:18
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