Table of Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Pervious Landscapes: Pope, Wordsworth, Cowper

Chapter One The Weather Underground: Pope in "Ode on Solitude"

Chapter Two Bearing It Away: "The Solitary Reaper"

Chapter Three "What Can It Signify?": Finding the Subject in "On the Ice-Islands Floating in the Germanic Ocean"

II. Landscapes of Loss: Duck, Goldsmith, Crabbe

Chapter Four "Lost, drown'd": The Problem of the Imagination in "The Thresher's Labour"

Chapter Five Road to Nowhere: The Poetics of Absence in "The Deserted Village"

Chapter Six Lost Cause: The Village and the Place of the Manners Tribute

III. Vanishings: Thomson, Gray, Smith

Chapter Seven "Conning Nature's Book": Body, Soul, Self, and Poetic Vision in The Seasons

Chapter Eight Vanishing Point: Gray in the Eton Ode

Chapter Nine "Bearing the Cor’se to Land": Beachy Head

Epilogue

Works Cited

About the Author

Elizabeth R. Napier is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Middlebury College. She has published on, among other subjects, eighteenth-century English Gothic fiction, problems of embodiment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction, and narrative strategies in the work of Daniel Defoe.

Reviews

"This exemplary study of eighteenth-century landscape poetry explores the complex relationship of self and place to present new, original, and intelligent readings of a range of authors from the period." -Dr Carol Bolton, Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough University, UK.