Starlight Wood Av Fiona Sampson

<p><b>''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, <i>Mail on Sunday</i><br></b><br><b>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.</b><br><br>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 environm

Starlight Wood is conceptual and concrete discussion of Romanticism and the British countryside, with ten chapters moving from an encounter with the actual countryside into an exploration of one specific theme, moving between history, history of ideas, politics, literature, art, farming, anecdotes and observations. As a hybrid of writing about place and the history of ideas, with an element of life writing, it delves specifically into the Pre-Romantic world, German Romanticism, natural philosophy, Provincialism, travel writing, and much more.