Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the InfiniteTo English poets and writers of the seventeenth century, as to their predecessors, mountains were ugly protuberances which disfigured nature and threatened the symmetry of earth; they were symbols God’s wrath. Yet, less than two centuries later the romantic poets sang in praise of mountain splendor, of glorious heights that stirred their souls to divine ecstasy. In this very readable and fascinating study, Marjorie Hope Nicolson considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the seventeenth century that caused the shift from mountain gloom to mountain glory. She examines various writers from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and traces both the causes and the process of this drastic change in perception. |
Contents
1 The Literary Heritage | 34 |
2 The Theological Dilemma | 72 |
3 New Philosophy | 113 |
4 The Geological Dilemma | 144 |
5A Sacred Theory of the Earth | 184 |
6 The Burnet Controversy | 225 |
7 The Aesthetics of the Infinite | 271 |
8 A New Descriptive Poetry | 324 |
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References to this book
Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics and Planning J. Douglas Porteous No preview available - 2002 |