Ordinary Landscapes: Setting and Description in the Nineteenth Century Novel

This dissertation traces the afterlife of picturesque aesthetics in the nineteenth-century novel’s scenic imagination. While studies of the novel often prioritize plot and character over literary modes of picturing, attending to fiction’s rendering of landscape, scenery, and property is equally foundational for grasping how literature responds to and participates in the reorganization of social space. I show (counterintuitively, since it is a mode of picturing that the realist novel, with its aspiration to reject illusion, typically eschews) that the picturesque’s meaning, as a landscape aesthetic, remained more expansive and controversial after its eighteenth-century heyday than is commonly accepted. Taking up three novels as case studies (Bleak House (1852), Adam Bede (1859) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)), I argue that their realist modes of picturing specifically reveal how the residual category of the picturesque unexpectedly resurfaces in the mid-Victorian period as irritant, framing device, and mirror. I resituate these hyper-canonical works in a media ecology crowded with pictures circulating in print and as visual spectacles, curating a broad visual archive to showcase a mid-century cultural field rife with a variety of competing visual and textual “reality effects,” which I identify in sources as diverse as drawing manuals, landscape sketches, and illustrations. In the context of the burgeoning of mass media, urbanization, and the century-spanning progress of legal and informal processes of privatization, picturesque aesthetics and an emergent aesthetics of realism continued to operate in constructive tension. In tracing the persistence of the picturesque, this project argues for the significance of residual categories in shaping modern social orders and literary forms.