NATURE & INDUSTRIALIZATION - What effect did the Industrial Revolution have on the landscape of Britain, on the way in which people viewed that landscape and Nature in general, and on the way in which they regarded work? Contemporary accounts in prose, poems, and ballads suggest some answers to these questions; for instance, how unlike a pastoral idyll work seemed to those who did it. The views of philosophers like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and Marx and of romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth are among the many, expressed mainly between 1760 and 1860, that are represented in this anthology, along with descriptions of the effects of urbanization and changes in transport and technology, evidence of the importance of the idea of ‘natural’ composition in music, and examples of romantic descriptions of Nature and the painting of the period. Industrialization is seen not merely as a force changing nature and society through its own internal logic but also as a development affected by the arts and by changing patterns of thought; the arts in their turn, are shown not just passively responding to change but also actively conditioning the ways men perceived their world and its changing forms of work.

Condition: Good - Editor: Alasdaire Clayre - Publisher: Oxford University Press - Pages: 414 - Paperback