Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics)

When we look at a majestic scene in nature, it is hard to believe that our appreciation of its beauty would have been completely foreign to an observer four centuries ago. In Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Marjorie Hope Nicolson argues that the rise of an aesthetic appreciation of nature's grandeur in English writing did not originate with exposure to Italian landscape painting, Orientalism, or the concept of the sublime in art, as have been postulated. Rather, Nicolson demonstrates a direct line of sentiment from Henry More, to Thomas Burnet, John Dennis, Anthony Shaftesbury, and Joseph Addison, and then to the Romantics, in which modern concepts such as infinity and regularity gradually develop into an acceptance of the magnificence of nature as a reflection of God. Originally published in 1959, this book's reprinting demonstrates the importance of its standing in the history of aesthetic ecological thought.