Architecture Commons^™

Public Parks And Private Ideologies: Building Nineteenth-Century British National Identity Through Landscape, Laura Swaim Witherington

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project examines how nineteenth-century landscape theories shaped national identity and were influenced by it. Predominant is an investigation of how the desire for a more egalitarian class structure underlies the changes in British landscape design from an attachment to classical exclusivity through pastoral tropes to a limited acceptance of middle and working classes within public landscapes that represented patriotic values. Although poetic works inform the study, novel-length fiction and non-fiction prose and periodicals are also a primary source of consideration. Novels demonstrate how fictional geography generates the constructs of national ideology, and although canonical works typically referenced in studu …