Output details

The common field landscape: cultural commemoration and the impact of enclosure, c.1770-1850

Context:

The research in this chapter extends prior work presented by Waites at the conference Land Questions: Social, Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Land in the United Kingdom 1750-2000 (University of Hertfordshire, July 2005). It forms part of an edited collection of papers which offer the first pan-British analysis of ‘the land question’, of the social, cultural and political debates surrounding the use and ownership of land.

Research resides within the processes of:

the novel assessment of how English landscape painters depicted unenclosed commons and wastes as a vehicle for expressing Romantic feelings of space, freedom and sublimity; providing a new social, cultural, political and economic perspective on the land question as it played out in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; proposing a new way of understanding the development of the English landscape painting tradition.

Insights:

This chapter offers the first published account of how English landscape painters of the early-nineteenth century demonstrated a nostalgic awareness of the social impact of changing agricultural methods by finding beauty in the uninterrupted, pre-enclosure flatness of common arable or ‘waste’ land.

A review of the volume stated that although the book was ‘very strong in its chronicle of attempts to theorize and politically shape land reform, it is not as strong in detailing the role that the land played in the expressive culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. The one exception is Ian Waites’s study of the cultural commemoration of enclosure.’ Professor Jamie Bronstein, New Mexico State University, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/946