ENGLISHNESS AND LANDSCAPE

Among the literary works there is a multitude of icons and symbols

of England spread with a great literary craftsmanship. The natural
environment, the geographical frames or the historical background have a
strong connection with the concept of Englishness. Starting with a
beautiful rose, the national flower of England which has an interesting
symbolic history and getting to Stonehenge with its famous appearance
in Hardy's Tess D'Urbervilles, we discover the English particularities
in paintings, literature, sculpture, etc.
There would be many things to say about Englishness or landscape,
but the most relevant ones are those which remained as time passes
by. The oak tree, the rose, the Big Ben, The Royal Crown are all
part of the English landscape.
But landscape doesn't mean only the natural or geographical
context. By landscape we should understand also the social, the
cultural, the political aspects which characterized England along its
development.
The meaningful images from Dickens 'Oliver Twist or David
Copperfield , the economic and social rough conditions of that period
help us merge into the Victorian England landscape.
The writers, the painters, the artists in general, improved the
concept of Englishness by make it widen all over the world.
Beginning with the eighteenth century appeared an appreciation of the
possibility of using images as historical evidence for social and
economical conditions.
The class-specific nature of landscape representations is thus
reinforced by absences and this establishes the connection with the
transition from feudalism to capitalism. The break created between
reality and representation proves the complicity of landscape
representation in a socio-economic change process. The idea of
landscape was controversial because of this break, an aspect which
made it less realistic.
The evolution of the landscape aesthetic in the twentieth century
was no longer underpinned by religious certainties. The British
tradition was rediscovered in the wake of Modernism and Neo-
Romanticism. The Neo-Romantics focused on an individual, poetic
point of view of the landscape, they tend to portray their inspiration
from artists of the age of high romanticism and from the sense of
place they perceive in historic rural landscapes. They longed for a
perfect love , utopian landscapes, romantic death and history-in-
landscapes.
Prof. D. Cosgrove centered his attention on the meaning of
landscape in human and cultural geography, stressing on the duplicity
of landscape focusing more upon human ideals and imagination.
Stephen Daniels was pointing out that: ‘ the project of combining
the aesthetic with the social has often amounted to fixing images to
literal conditions , translating them into concepts, reducing them to’’
signifiers’’ of social forces and relations…I have attended to the
social history of landscape images to unfold their range and subtlety,
to amplify their eloquence. It is not so much a procedure of
unmasking images, to disclose their real identity, as one of
envisioning images of showing their many faces, from many shifty
perspectives’’.
The English landscape changed in time because of human progress
and it is still in a continuous evolution which will never stop.
Landscape is both science and art , unifies and blends the elements
of nature and construction.
Englishness consists in art, folklore, literature, music, religion,
sport and leisure, and the mixture of all these developed the English
landscape. There is often considered that English painting typifies the
tradition of English art, illustrating as it does the evolution of the
country house and its landscaping.
Cathedrals and parish houses are seen with a sense of traditional
Englishness. Landscape gardening as developed by Capability Brown
set an international trend for the English garden. Gardening and
visiting gardens are perceived as typically English pursuits.
Writers noted for expressing Englishness include William
Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Jane
Austen, Arnold Bennet and The Lake Poets.
W. Hogarth ’s depiction of a scene from Shakespeare ' s work The
Tempest represents an evidence of how English literature influenced
painting in the eighteenth century.