Landscape and Ecology

Landscape – as medium, object, and ecosystem – is a particular focus of my book Romantic Capabilities (Oxford, 2020). The book’s sprawling “History in Three Dimensions” chapter tracks how the landscape aesthetic of the “picturesque,” as it migrates across media in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, renders visible the distinctiveness of different immersive media platforms. The focus is on landscape in the late eighteenth-century massive surround painting format known as the “panorama,” in Victorian 3-D photography (or stereography), and in the innovative and absorptive verbal descriptions of Walter Scott’s historical novels. The book’s closing chapter, “Capability Jane: The Ecological Designs of Austenian Realism,” attends to eighteenth-century landscape gardening as both an artistic medium and an intellectual project. Landscape designers and engineers like Capability Brown, Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, and Humphry Repton promoted new ways of thinking about realities as system-states that carry extant potentials. Their notion of gardening as a medium that does not reflect or represent reality so much as reveal its capabilities informed what I suggest is the ecological sensibility of Jane Austen’s approach to habitats in her realist domestic novels.