Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque

by Cynthia Wall

Overview

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of “approach.” In architecture, the term “approach” changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate “through the most interesting part of the grounds,” as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it.  The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the “lesser parts of speech”. The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines—new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226467832
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/21/2019
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Cynthia Wall is professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is an editor of works by Bunyan, Defoe, and Pope, and the author of The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London and The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

A Note on My Text ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 The Architectural Approach 11

The etymology of "approach" (n. s.) 13

The concept of approach (n. s. and v.): the "ancient" and the "modern" lines 17

The language of approach (v.): architectutal and syntactical design 27

The traveler's approach 35

The novelist's approach 39

2 The Prepositional Building 49

The park gate lodge 51

The topographical view: angles and staffage 62

A Bridge to the next part: "A Village on, or across, the Thames" 82

3 The Topographical Page 91

The typographical landscape 93

The letters on the page 96

i Hants 99

ii Capitals and Italics 104

iii Catchwords 110

iv $$$ Pointing 118

4 The Grammar In Between 137

The rise of grammar 139

The rise of the preposition 144

Clarissa and the little words: the avenue and the approach 155

i Richardson as printer 155

ii Clarissa and prepositions 159

iii Clarissa as preposition 165

5 The Narrative Picturesque 171

Syntactical architecture in textual landscapes 173

i Bunyan: "thinges … included in one word" 174

ii Defoe: "in a Word" 181

iii Haywood: "In fine, she was undone" 185

The narrative picturesque 192

i Radcliffe and the prepositional phrase 194

ii Burney and the psychological interior 202

iii Austen and the approach to the interior 212

Coda: A Topographical Page 223

Notes 227

Bibliography 277

Index 313

Editorial Reviews

"The short space allotted for this review cannot begin to do justice to the range of fascinating objects examined by Wall’s study, its breadth and depth of knowledge, and the insights generated by its brilliant readings of the novels of Richardson (Clarissa, in particular), Radcliffe, Burney, Austen, and others. Grammars of Approach reveals how interdisciplinary work can provide us not only with an understanding but also with a sense of the long eighteenth century. This book places us in the middle distance of approach, bringing into view less familiar cultural objects and allowing us to see old favourites from different vantage points and with fresh eyes."

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Cynthia Wall provides a wealth of new evidence for the notion that writing and architecture have comparable and interrelated ways of producing meaning. This elegantly written work will serve as a reference for all those interested in the interdisciplinarity of eighteenth-century cultural forms.

David Spurr

This is a stunningly original book. It’s a stroke of genius to link together these three modes of reading—reading a landscape, reading language, and reading the physical appearance of a page. All obey (or break) rules of grammar through their use of space and punctuation; scale and focus; the direct, the meandering, the oblique, the carefully signaled emphasis. In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall significantly expands how we think about form and visuality.

Kate Flint

"This remarkable study will interest scholars from all these fields, but its main achievement is to resist being limited to or contained by any of them,preferring instead to pursue its own wonderfully articulate approach."

Modern Philology - Peter de Bolla

Grammars of Approach is the best kind of literary history. Wall combines capacious knowledge of the eighteenth century with an entirely original understanding of the ways in which thinkers in the period described a redistributed perceptual field—one in which landscape gardening, accounts of grammar and composition, architecture, and narrative all began to perceive and describe a newly important middle distance. Wall’s generous conception of the notion of the approach illuminates the novel’s role in dispatching abstract personification and replacing it with an expansive sense of physical space that can be occupied by multiple perspectives.

Frances Ferguson

"At once oblique and straightforward, suggestive and pellucid, this book realizes a fundamentally ethical project as it brings humble, hardworking things into the foreground—grammar books and prepositional phrases whose job it is to uphold, unpraised and invisible, the perceptual possibilities of any English sentence. Here, reading is 'three-dimensional' and perpetually generative, and the conditions of these possibilities are visible in Wall’s signature combination of wit, imagination, erudition, and meticulous attention to what goes unnoticed by everybody else. . . . The moral? We do have a future. Wall and her fellow travelers teach us how we might best approach it, and at long last find ourselves at home."

 

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Jayne Lewis