Description
Book Synopsis''A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto'' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday
We think we know the Romantic countryside: that series of picturesque landscapes familiar from paintings, poems and music that are still part of Britain''s idea of itself today.
But for the Romantics themselves, the countryside was a place where radical change was underway both within and around them. ''Romanticism isn''t a cultural artefact; it''s a way for thought to move,'' writes highly acclaimed biographer and poet Fiona Sampson in this transporting and vividly evocative book, in which she spends a year walking in the Romantics'' footsteps, from Kent to Kintyre. Setting out across ten landscapes, as the Romantics once did as they wrote, travelled, settled, or tried to define the rural enviro
Trade Review
A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue... Accompany Sampson on her varied rambles you'll find your eyes opened anew to the beauty not only of nature, but also of creative engagement with every aspect of the world * Mail on Sunday *
'Rigorous scholarship and extensive biographical knowledge underpin Sampson's text... entertaining and illuminating... arresting' * Times Literary Supplement *
'There are fine evocations of place and season... It has so much to offer the reader' * Literary Review *
[An] eloquent, evocative meditation * Saga *
