"Despite the negative criticism directed at its sentiment, its heartlessness, its superficiality, the picturesque remained in both art and fiction of Victorian England a mode of seeing that even the greatest of the artists and novelists relied upon from time to time so that their viewers and readers could rejoice in the instant recognition of place and character distinctly limned and sometimes subtly enough to elicit sympathy" (Preface). After briefly tracing the development of the theory of the picturesque in the eighteenth-century writings of William Gilpin, Sir Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight and examining how nineteenth-century novelists accommodated aesthetic theory to the practice of fiction, Ross focuses on the use of the picturesque in the works of Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. The persistence of the picturesque through novels ranging from Waverley to Jude the Obscure and in writers like Dickens and Eliot, who had little respect for its conventions, attests to its strength and attraction in nineteenth-century literature.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment. Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.

This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that ‘idleness’ is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of ‘the Victorians’ as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to ‘re-subjectification’ and the assertion of a ‘late-Romantic’ sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context.

A rediscovery of Thoreau’s interactions with everyday objects and how they shaped his thought. Though we may associate Henry David Thoreau with ascetic renunciation, he accumulated a variety of tools, art, and natural specimens throughout his life as a homebuilder, surveyor, and collector. In some of these objects, particularly Indigenous artifacts, Thoreau perceived the presence of their original makers, and he called such objects “mindprints.” Thoreau believed that these collections could teach him how his experience, his world, fit into the wider, more diverse (even incoherent) assemblage of other worlds created and re-created by other beings every day. In this book, Ivan Gaskell explores how a profound environmental aesthetics developed from this insight and shaped Thoreau’s broader thought.

For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry.