Our ancestors did not always see beauty in the starkness of
deserts, mountains, and polar wastes; that was the work of ages. In
The Road to Egdon Heath (1999), Richard Bevis undertook to explain
how and why this change - noted by Thomas Hardy in 1878 - came
about. In Images of Liberty he picks up this story in the late
nineteenth century and carries it into the present time.
"That the mid-1870s saw Thomas Hardy imagine Egdon Heath out of
a few Dorset moors and present it as the modern standard of natural
beauty; Charles Doughty go wandering with nomads in the Arabian
desert; John Muir begin to write about his climbs in the Sierra
Nevada; John Wesley Powell affirm the arid reality of the American
West; and Herman Melville publish a long poem about the wilderness
of Judaea while explorers were probing the polar oceans, is not
likely to have been mere coincidence."
He finds that influences as diverse as Buddhism, industrial
development, climate change, and tourism have shaped attitudes
toward "the Great," and even its physical reality. Bevis concludes
that the impulses that drove the pioneers to Hardy's "chastened
sublimity" have not passed away. "Our horizons are still spacious,
still liberating, and not unknowable."
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
