Introduction; 1. Approaching landscape and literature: Classical influences; Biblical influences: Eden and expulsion; The garden of love; The greenwood; Elegant shepherds; Symbolic nature; The eighteenth century: the Enlightenment; Towards the Romantics; Confinement and space; Assignments; 2. Approaching the texts: Chaucer's landscapes; Shakespeare's landscapes; Marvell's ingenuity; Landscapes for elegy; Landscapes for religion; The country house; Romantic solitude; Landscapes of childhood; The Romantics: the Sublime and the Gothic; Hardy's Wessex; Observation and beyond; Working the land; Desolated land; Ancient and modern; Assignments; 3. Texts and extracts: Simon Armitage, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Parlement of Foulys; Thomas Carew, 'The Spring', John Clare, from The Shepherd's Calendar; Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'Spring'; John Milton, from Paradise Lost; James Thomson, from The Seasons; Dorothy Wordsworth, from her Journals; Jane Austen, from Sense and Sensibility; Percy Bysshe Shelley, from 'Monte Blanc'; Matthew Arnold, from 'The Scholar Gipsy'; George Eliot, from The Mill on the Floss; John Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath; Thomas Hardy, from Tess of the D'Urbervilles; D.H. Lawrence, from The Rainbow; Edmund Blunden, from Undertones of War; Stella Gibbons, from Cold Comfort Farm; T.S. Eliot, from The Four Quartets; Richard Wilbur, 'Year's End'; William Golding, from Free Fall; Angela Carter, from 'The Erl-King'; Ted Hughes, from Tales from Ovid; 4. Critical approaches: Political approaches; Feminist approaches; Ecological approaches; Assignments; 5. How to write about landscape and literature: Responding to a poem; Responding to prose; Comparison; Preparing to write about a topic; Writing about the topic; Assignments; 6. Resources: Further reading; Media resources: film and television; Websites; Glossary; Index; Acknowledgements.
