Critical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. Landscape and Literature introduces students to the exploration of different ways in which landscape has been represented in literature. It focuses on key aspects of this topic such as the importance of pastoral, contrasts between city and country, eighteenth-century developments from neo-classical to picturesque and Romantic ideas of the sublime, regional novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and varied styles of twentieth-century poetry from the Georgian poets to Heaney and Hughes. Poems and prose extracts from writers such as Marvell, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence and Seamus Heaney are included.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1. Approaching landscape and literature: Classical influences; Biblical influences: Eden and expulsion; The garden of love; The greenwood; Elegant shepherds; Symbolic nature; The eighteenth century: the Enlightenment; Towards the Romantics; Confinement and space; Assignments; 2. Approaching the texts: Chaucer's landscapes; Shakespeare's landscapes; Marvell's ingenuity; Landscapes for elegy; Landscapes for religion; The country house; Romantic solitude; Landscapes of childhood; The Romantics: the Sublime and the Gothic; Hardy's Wessex; Observation and beyond; Working the land; Desolated land; Ancient and modern; Assignments; 3. Texts and extracts: Simon Armitage, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Parlement of Foulys; Thomas Carew, 'The Spring', John Clare, from The Shepherd's Calendar; Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'Spring'; John Milton, from Paradise Lost; James Thomson, from The Seasons; Dorothy Wordsworth, from her Journals; Jane Austen, from Sense and Sensibility; Percy Bysshe Shelley, from 'Monte Blanc'; Matthew Arnold, from 'The Scholar Gipsy'; George Eliot, from The Mill on the Floss; John Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath; Thomas Hardy, from Tess of the D'Urbervilles; D.H. Lawrence, from The Rainbow; Edmund Blunden, from Undertones of War; Stella Gibbons, from Cold Comfort Farm; T.S. Eliot, from The Four Quartets; Richard Wilbur, 'Year's End'; William Golding, from Free Fall; Angela Carter, from 'The Erl-King'; Ted Hughes, from Tales from Ovid; 4. Critical approaches: Political approaches; Feminist approaches; Ecological approaches; Assignments; 5. How to write about landscape and literature: Responding to a poem; Responding to prose; Comparison; Preparing to write about a topic; Writing about the topic; Assignments; 6. Resources: Further reading; Media resources: film and television; Websites; Glossary; Index; Acknowledgements.