The Invention of the Countryside Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831

About this book

Today's hunting debate began in the eighteenth century, when the idea of the countryside was being invented through the imaginative displacement of agricultural production in favour of country sports and landscape tourism. Between the Game Act of 1671 and its repeal in 1831, writers on walking and hunting often held opposed views, but contributed equally to the origins of modern ecology, while sharing a commitment to trespass that preserved common rights in an era of growing privatization.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Plates
List of Figures

Inventing the Countryside: An Introduction

Part I: From Country to Countryside
- The Greenness of Hunting
- Land, and Writing about Land
- Game and the Poacher
- The Sporting Life
- Origins of the Anti-Hunting Campaign

Part II: Hunting a Country
- Sportswomen
- Pleasures of the Chase circa 1735 to circa 1830
- The Pleasures of Surtees

Part III: Walking in the Countryside
- The Pleasures of Perambulation
- 'This Lime-Tree Bower' as Walking Poem
- Dartmoor Visible

Endnotes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Donna Landry is Professor of English at Wayne State University and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. Her publications include, as author, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 and, with Gerald MacLean, she is co-author of Materialist Feminisms.