English Literature and Culture on 'Nature'

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

It was not until the 18th century that they began to show interest in ‘nature' in England. As the results of Grand Tour and the exploration in abroad, they discovered alien and domestic ‘nature'. ‘Nature' they looked on in those days, however, was no more than ‘landscape' framed by virtue of an aesthetic theory, ‘picturesque', and they would forge ‘nature' by following the Italian landscape paintings in the 17th century. English landscape garden, landscape poetry and picturesque tour widely favoured were the results of the ‘picturesque' theory.. And the genre of landscape painting rose in those days and reached the zenith in the 19th century with the advents of J.M.W.Tumer and John Constable. Then the genre began to decline and fall with the lapse of time. The process is studied in reference to natural history and imperial ideology.As a result of reviewing books on the subject of ‘nature' in Africa and Japan, I found that the characteristic of ‘nature' in England was based upon its ‘picturesque' theory, so that I correlated the aesthetic theory with travel literatures. Then,. by comparing picturesque tour searching for the ideal landscape with ‘pedestrian' travel gained popularity among the middle-class youth in the late 18th century, I would bring the cultural and political ideology implied in the latter to light and go through the process of getting rid of the ‘picturesque' theory and the discovery of ‘nature' for its own sake.