New languages of nature in Victorian England: The Pre -Raphaelite landscape, natural history and modern architecture in the 1850s

The dissertation is entitled "New Languages of Nature in Victorian England: The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, Natural History, and Modern Architecture in the 1850s." This study provides new ways of thinking about landscape and landscape painting, ways which are particular to England in the mid-nineteenth century, but which will extend into other disciplines as well as other geographic regions of artistic endeavor. To that end, I have used a wide variety of primary sources including books, journals, newspapers, and archival documents to form my argument. I have also drawn on the expanding fields of Cultural Geography and heritage studies to enhance my thinking in more art historical areas.;The crucial issues that I address are: the state of research into landscape painting of the mid-Victorian period and the status of Pre-Raphaelite landscapes in British art history; the relation of specific sites of Pre-Raphaelite landscape practice to the development of inner and outer London in the early 1850s, and the role of the railroads and contemporary forms of transport in helping to define a relationship between humankind and nature, artist and environment, and travel and conceptions of modernity; the interconnections between the Pre-Raphaelite approach to nature in their landscapes and contemporary conceptions of the display and control of nature through the study and pursuit of natural history; and finally, the role played by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle in forming a modern approach to public and private institutions concerned with natural history and sciences, as conclusively and brilliantly realized in the architecture and decorations of the Oxford University Museum. This study in art and cultural history, while concentrating on the 1850s, will, I hope, stimulate a reconsideration of English art of the later decades of the nineteenth century, with the aim of trying to understand the relationship between artists and nature in this period of great environmental and social change.