This study addresses the development of the English suburb in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Its proposition is that suburbs were where people wanted to live, and not just to avoid the dirt and disease of the city. They had an appeal beyond the practical. Whether it was a feeling of security, independence, oneness with nature, or of living in 'a place apart', there was an emotional, culturally-conditioned attraction. The specific focus is on the development of the Calverley estate in Tunbridge Wells. The point is not that Calverley was typical, but that it represented a suburban 'ideal'. It was created by a London developer, John Ward, to be just such a 'place apart', an idyllic retreat for a wealthy metropolitan middle class. The study starts by considering Ward's 'vision' for Calverley. Ward had been a major investor in Regent's Park. The study suggests that Calverley, with its 'picturesque' landscape setting, mirrored the fantasy world created by John Nash in Regent's Park. In Calverley, though, Ward and his architect, Decimus Burton, built individual houses in gardens, a model for what was later to become 'a universal suburbia'. A second section considers what attracted Ward's customers. It suggests four influences: the notion of the Picturesque; historical associations; idealised visions of the countryside; and the appeal of certain architectural styles. The final part then examines those customers in more detail. They were not drawn from the existing residents of Tunbridge Wells, but were metropolitan/cosmopolitan incomers (70% of them women). They could have lived anywhere. The study uses five themes of suburban historiography: movement, control, separation, withdrawal and identity, to show how they moulded the physical and social space around them to further achieve their ideal; to create, in the words of one advertisement, this 'enviable little English Elysium'.

Esse trabalho pretende investigar as diferentes percepções de significado da palavra paisagem e seus desdobramentos na atividade do arquiteto urbanista. Para tanto, percorre um primeiro desenvolvimento que associa paisagem às diferentes concepções que se têm dela, procurando distinguir a qualidade que nos parece fundamental: a de ser um grande articulador de temas, lugar de múltiplas valências estéticas que dão significado à relação entre homem e natureza. A confusão entre paisagem e o que venha a ser natureza, associado ao fenômeno de supremacia de uma suposta ciência e conseqüente crescimento da figura do planejamento corroboram a redução do complexo significado da paisagem. A questão da possível sobrevivência em tempos modernos de chaves estéticas ligadas ao século XVIII constitui o cenário para a distinção da figura de Frederick Law Olmsted como pioneiro da atividade da arquitetura da paisagem com dimensões para toda a cultura de uma época. A paisagem como a construção de um olhar comparece nessa elaboração, tecendo a partir de exemplos históricos uma multiplicidade de significados que recusam os estreitamentos, apontando algumas fontes de possíveis enganos. A tese afirma a dimensão cultural e estética da arte como pivô nas criações de uma arquitetura da paisagem. / This research intends to explore the several meaning perceptions of the word landscape and their connection to the activity of the architect. Therefore, it runs at first the different concepts of the term landscape, trying to sort out of them the quality that seems fundamental to us: to be the great link to different themes, the place of multiple aesthetic values that makes meaningful the human-nature relationship. The confusion between concepts of landscape and nature, due to the supremacy of so-called science, and the subsequent outgrowth of planning corroborate the reduction of the complex meaning of the landscape concept. The question of a possible survival in modern times of aesthetic keys from the 18th century constitutes the background to the distinction of Frederick Law Olmsted as a pioneer in the activity of landscape architecture, of great significance of a whole era. Landscape as a construction of the eye appears in this elaboration, interlacing from historical examples a multiplicity of meanings that rejects to be straitened, and points to sources of possible misunderstandings. This work reaffirms the cultural and aesthetic dimension of art as motor for the inventions of landscape architecture.

<p>This thesis examines one of the most fraught and distorted relationships—the association between the United States and Iran. Contemporarily, most scholars and professionals associated with this connection evaluate the relationship in terms of politics, religion, power, and national security. Far fewer, however, evaluate it from its roots—the cultures, relationships, and dependencies that ultimately produced the prickly relationship of these two countries today. This thesis utilizes American authored travel narratives from 1921- 1941, written primarily by recreational travelers, to contradict American contemporary and paternalistic views of the relationship with Iran. This thesis posits that a nascent and unsure America depended on a pre-modern Iran to ease her into an impending modern existence.</p>

Walter's Scott's novel Waverley depicts Scotland as a picturesque country, which produces a distinctive and romantic picture with incorporating the local elements: Scottish natural landscape, the heroic Jacobites, the bardic tradition and Gaelic culture. Scott¡¦s picturesque representation of a romantic Scotland, built upon the mixture of romance and history, achieves two goals: it offers the Scots an idealized Scottish nation while making Scotland¡¦s participation in the Union with England palatable to both the Scots and the English, giving the Scots an authentic image of their own country and the English a tourist destination of picturesque beauty. Chapter one defines the term ¡§picturesque,¡¨ discusses its changing meanings as an aesthetic category, and introduces the general picturesque experience of Scotland. Chapter two discusses Scott¡¦s use of the picturesque in Waverley and its concomitant paradoxes in Scott¡¦s idealization of a British nation. Chapter three focuses on the romanticizing of the Scottish landscape as well as on how the image supported Romantic nationalism. That romantic picture of a Gaelic Scotland then turned into the set picturesque view that tourists had of Scotland, even before they actually traveled there. The illustrated editions of Scott¡¦s novels played a major role in turning Scotland into ¡§Scott-land,¡¨ a country made up of a novelist¡¦s ambition and imagination.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 58 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-55).

Esse trabalho pretende investigar as diferentes percepções de significado da palavra paisagem e seus desdobramentos na atividade do arquiteto urbanista. Para tanto, percorre um primeiro desenvolvimento que associa paisagem às diferentes concepções que se têm dela, procurando distinguir a qualidade que nos parece fundamental: a de ser um grande articulador de temas, lugar de múltiplas valências estéticas que dão significado à relação entre homem e natureza. A confusão entre paisagem e o que venha a ser natureza, associado ao fenômeno de supremacia de uma suposta ciência e conseqüente crescimento da figura do planejamento corroboram a redução do complexo significado da paisagem. A questão da possível sobrevivência em tempos modernos de chaves estéticas ligadas ao século XVIII constitui o cenário para a distinção da figura de Frederick Law Olmsted como pioneiro da atividade da arquitetura da paisagem com dimensões para toda a cultura de uma época. A paisagem como a construção de um olhar comparece nessa elaboração, tecendo a partir de exemplos históricos uma multiplicidade de significados que recusam os estreitamentos, apontando algumas fontes de possíveis enganos. A tese afirma a dimensão cultural e estética da arte como pivô nas criações de uma arquitetura da paisagem. / This research intends to explore the several meaning perceptions of the word landscape and their connection to the activity of the architect. Therefore, it runs at first the different concepts of the term landscape, trying to sort out of them the quality that seems fundamental to us: to be the great link to different themes, the place of multiple aesthetic values that makes meaningful the human-nature relationship. The confusion between concepts of landscape and nature, due to the supremacy of so-called science, and the subsequent outgrowth of planning corroborate the reduction of the complex meaning of the landscape concept. The question of a possible survival in modern times of aesthetic keys from the 18th century constitutes the background to the distinction of Frederick Law Olmsted as a pioneer in the activity of landscape architecture, of great significance of a whole era. Landscape as a construction of the eye appears in this elaboration, interlacing from historical examples a multiplicity of meanings that rejects to be straitened, and points to sources of possible misunderstandings. This work reaffirms the cultural and aesthetic dimension of art as motor for the inventions of landscape architecture.

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This thesis explores the Picturesque as a visual aesthetic that is often self-consciously employed in the travel accounts of British women in India in the first half of the nineteenth century. It addresses how three women - Fanny Parks, Marianne Postans, and Emily Eden - made use of the language of aesthetics, in particular that of the Picturesque (a style deemed especially appropriate for women travellers) in a variety of ways: first, to help them understand and relate to their experiences in this foreign land; second, to convey these experiences to their audiences back home; and, third to carve out what frequently becomes a feminised space within the established (and predominantly masculine) field of travel writing. The approach is largely historicist in order to situate the authors (and artists) within their contemporary cultural, social, and political context. My work builds upon that of literary scholars Elizabeth Bohls, Nigel Leask, and Sara Suleri in its interweaving of historical research and visual aesthetics with a literary analysis of travel writing and colonialism, bringing to bear their insights on authors previously little or not at all addressed in critical literature. Expanding on the notion of the 'Indian picturesque', which Leask begins to shape in his work, I bring Parks, Postans, and Eden into dialogue with the suggestions of Bohls and Suleri that women travel writers adapt the traditionally masculine ideal of the Picturesque aesthetic. After an introduction and two chapters which explore the broader themes concerning the development of the Picturesque and its influence on British artistic representations of India, I briefly summarise how this visual aesthetic came to be applied to written texts about travels in the region, beginning with the texts produced by male travellers, and with a specific focus on the travel narrative of Captain Godfrey Charles Mundy, whose accounts are referenced in Fanny Parks' work. My thesis then offers three case studies considering each writer in order of their arrival in India - starting with Fanny Parks' autobiography of her travels (published in 1850), followed by the published works of Marianne Postans in the 1830s, and through to those of Emily Eden, relating to her travels in the same decade and published in 1866. Aside from drawing on the aesthetics of visual art, the discussion of each author also addresses the importance of other sources to which they allude that enable aesthetic responses to India's landscape and peoples.

According to Edward Said the Orient is a European construction that has arisen out of a need to describe the Western civilisation as culturally superior. This occurrence Said gives the label "Orientalism". Art historian Linda Nochlin takes Said’s theories further in The Imaginary Orient where she conveys the thesis that the pictorial Orientalism is an expression of an imperialistic ideology. John M. Mackenzie, on the other hand is of the opinion that the pictorial Orientalism rather is an expression of the Romantic movement. To understand the Orientalist art we have to consider the social and historical context in which the work was created. By trying to justify the Orientalists choice of motive Mackenzie takes the view of those who consider art history as a positive discipline. Nochlin on the other hand means that we instead of fortifying the art historical canon we ought to politicize it, which only is possible if we contemplate art history as a critical rather than a positive discipline.

This thesis examines and contextualises historically significant aspects of the ways in which David Roberts’ lucrative lithographic publication Egypt and Nubia (1846-49) represented the “Orient”. The analysis demonstrates that Roberts used tropes, particularly ruins and dispossessed figures, largely derived from a revised version of British picturesque landscape art, in order to depict Egypt as a developmentally poor state. By establishing how this imagery was interpreted in the context of the early Victorian British Empire, the thesis offers an elucidation of the connection between British imperial attitudes and the picturesque in Roberts’ work. The contemporary perception of Egypt and Nubia as a definitive representation of the state is argued to relate, not only to the utility of the picturesque as an “accurate” descriptive mode, despite its highly mediated nature, but also to the ways in which Britain responded to shifting political relationships with Egypt and the Ottoman Empire between 1830 and 1869. This political element of the research also suggests a more problematised reading of Robert’s work in relation to constructs of British imperialism and Edward Said’s theory of ‘Orientalism’, than has been provided by previous art historical accounts. A significant and innovative feature of the research is its focus on extensive analysis of textual descriptions of Egypt in early Victorian Britain and contemporary imperial historiography in relation to characteristics displayed in Roberts’ art. This offers a basis for a more specific, contextual understanding of Roberts’ work, as well as historically repositioning nineteenth-century British picturesque art practice and the visual culture of the early Victorian British Empire.