| My ethnohistorical project takes historical class relations and traces various steps in the cultural production of class and national identity in England, specifically as it has operated through landscape and access to it. It deals with an intense and unusually protracted engagement with landscape as it has occurred in literary, aesthetic, artistic, political, legislative, recreational and educative dimensions, and treats landscape as an idiom for the materializing of culture.; Foregrounding an aesthetic ally-informed 18th-century discourse of nation allows me to delineate an educated elite's 'imagined community' that centered on painted, printed and actual unpeopled landscapes. I contextualize this imagined community within articulation and practices of British nationalism and popularization of the Picturesque aesthetic. The valorization of unpeopled landscapes becomes a point from which to negotiate a series of related fields of tension within 'polite society', as well as between polite society and the enclosure movement's immiseration of the dispossessed.; I show how the Lake and Peak Districts became sounding boards of national sentiment that exposed different claims to history, and that the Lake District, around which 'a' version of an homogenous English national identity was constructed by an intellectual elite, paradoxically became the site of cultural differentiation of class participation. Legislative, legal and extra-legal challenges made to legal, quasi-legal and illegal practices of denying access preceed an overview of post-1945 legislation by which national parks were established in England and Wales between 1951 and 1957. This section ends with the reemergence in the 1990s of demands for open access to land within and beyond national parks.; My multi-sited peripatetic ethnography of the Lake District investigates how walking groups and clubs are a socially constitutive force shaping personal identity and a 'sense' of community under the impact of social fragmentation, global economic restructuring, and European integration. I address race and the English landscape as a landscape of non-identity, as well as bringing a gendered view of walking. I show that walking groups cross-cut class as they create spaces for new structures of feeling. |
