Search results for ""Author Jeremy Burchardt""

Why does landscape matter to us? We rarely articulate the often highly individual ways it can do so. Drawing on eight remarkable unpublished diaries, Jeremy Burchardt demonstrates that responses to landscape in modern Britain were powerfully affected by personal circumstances, especially those experienced in childhood and youth. Four major patterns are identified: 'Adherers' valued landscape for its continuity, 'Withdrawers' for the refuge it provides from perceived threats, 'Restorers' for its sustaining of core value systems, and 'Explorers' for its opportunities for self-discovery and development. Lifescapes sets out a new approach to landscape history based on comparative biography and deep contextualization, which has far-reaching implications. It foregrounds family structures and relationships and the psychological dynamics they generate. These, it is argued, were usually a more decisive presence in landscape encounters than wider cultural patterns and forces. Seen in this way, landscape can be understood as a mirror reflecting our innermost selves and the psychosocial influences shaping our development. This is a compelling and original study of the relationship between individual lives and landscapes.

Read more less

A revisionist look at the true state of rural England between the two world wars. England is the country, and the country is England, as Stanley Baldwin famously said in 1924, but what kind of country was it? There are persistent memories of depression and depopulation, of dilapidated villages and deserted country houses, in a period of bitter discontent and disturbance when the brief febrile excitements of the 1920s gave way to the thirties, Auden's "low dishonest decade". Recent work has radically modified the history of the interwar years, but largely from an urban and industrial viewpoint. Hitherto this revisionist perspective has left unquestioned one of the central components of the old orthodoxy: that this was a period of unremitting, unmitigated decline in the countryside. In The English Countryside Between the Wars an interdisciplinary group of scholars have come together to challenge this view. Organised into sections on society, culture, politics and the economy,and embracing subjects as diverse as women novelists and village crafts, the book argues that almost everywhere we look in the countryside between the wars there were signs of new growth and dynamic development. This will be required reading for everyone with an interest in British history between the wars and to lecturers, teachers and students studying social, cultural, political, economic and environmental history, historical and cultural geography, English literature, performance studies and art and design history. Contributors: ALUN HOWKINS, CAITLIN ADAMS, MARION SHAW, MARK RAWLINSON, MICK WALLIS, DAVID JEREMIAH, CHRISTOPHER BAILEY, JOHN SHEAIL, CLARE GRIFFITHS, NICHOLAS MANSFIELD, ROY BRIGDEN

Read more less