Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a
powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of
landscape descriptions during the 'long' Eighteenth-century. Landscape
has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of
Eighteenth-century English culture; this book surveys those debates and
offers a provocative new account. Mayhew shows that describing landscape
was a religiously contested practice, and that different theological
positions led differing authors to different descriptive approaches.
Landscape description, then, shows English intellectual life still in
the grips of a Christian and classical mentality in the 'long'
Eighteenth-century.