Writers and artists across the centuries, from Chaucer to Ian McEwan, and from the creator of the Luttrell Psalter in the 14th century to John Piper in the 20th, looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk air, have felt very different things and woven them into their novels, poems and paintings. Alexandra Harris's subject is not the weather itself, but the weather as it is daily recreated in the human imagination. She builds her remarkable story from small evocative details and catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals: 'Bloody cold', says Jonathan Swift in the 'slobbery' January of 1713; Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one... Weatherland is both a sweeping panorama of cultural climates on the move and a richly illustrated, intimate account - for although weather is vast, it is experienced physically, emotionally and spiritually; as Harris cleverly reveals, it is at the very heart of English life and culture.
Writers and artists across the centuries, from Chaucer to Ian McEwan, and from the creator of the Luttrell Psalter in the 14th century to John Piper in the 20th, looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk air, have felt very different things and woven them into their novels, poems and paintings. Alexandra Harris's subject is not the weather itself, but the weather as it is daily recreated in the human imagination. She builds her remarkable story from small evocative details and catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals: 'Bloody cold', says Jonathan Swift in the 'slobbery' January of 1713; Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one... Weatherland is both a sweeping panorama of cultural climates on the move and a richly illustrated, intimate account - for although weather is vast, it is experienced physically, emotionally and spiritually; as Harris cleverly reveals, it is at the very heart of English life and culture.
Über den Autor
Alexandra Harris studied at Oxford and at the Courtauld Institute in London, and worked at Christie's for a year before returning to Oxford to write a doctorate on art and literature in the 1930s. She is now a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, running courses on Modernism and American writing, and leading the MA in Contemporary Literature. Her first full-length book, Romantic Moderns, published by Thames & Hudson, was the winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award. Alexandra Harris was also a winner in the BBC's 'New Generation Thinkers' contest in 2011.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
A Mirror in the Sky Tesserae I. 1. The Winter-Wise 2. Forms of Mastery 3. Imported Elements 4. Weathervane II. 5. 'Whan that Aprill...' 6. Month by Month 7. Secrets and Signs 8. A Holly Branch 9. 'Why fares the world thus?' III. 10. Splendour and Artifice 11. Shakespeare: Inside-Out IV. 12. Two Anatomists 13. Sky and Bones 14. Milton's Temperature; A Pause: On Freezeland Street V. 15. Method and Measurement 16. Reasoning with Mud 17. A Language for the Breeze 18. Dr Johnson Withstands the Weather 19. Day by Day VI. 20. Poets in the Storm 21. Wordsworth: Weather's Friend; A Flight: In Cloudland VII. 22. Shelley on Air 23. The Stillness of Keats 24. Clare's Calendar 25. Turner and the Sun; VIII. 26. Companions of the Sky 27.'Drip, Drip, Drip': Varieties of Gloom 28. Ruskin in the Age of Umber 29. Rain on a Grave; IX. 30. Bright New World 31. Greyscale 32. Too Much Weather; Flood
