Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque
Cynthia Wall
Abstract
This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new perceptual experience that visually explains a wider set of changing formal patterns and fundamental principles. The printed page underwent sweeping typographical modernizations: common nouns lost their capitals; proper nouns, their italics. The new uniformity paradoxically allowed more visibility to the "lesser parts" of speech, no longer visibly dominated by nouns. Grammarians began to pay more attentio ... More
This book explores how changes in eighteenth-century language and its expression on the page also reshaped the British landscape. The term “approach” shifted from verb to noun, creating a new perceptual experience that visually explains a wider set of changing formal patterns and fundamental principles. The printed page underwent sweeping typographical modernizations: common nouns lost their capitals; proper nouns, their italics. The new uniformity paradoxically allowed more visibility to the "lesser parts" of speech, no longer visibly dominated by nouns. Grammarians began to pay more attention to things like prepositions, and narrative patterns in literature developed more prepositional play. The new linguistic approach inspired new narrative approaches, such as free indirect discourse. Examining the work of landscape theorists alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and novels, this book reveals a new landscaping across disciplines--new approaches to perceiving and representing the world in word and image.
Keywords:
architecture,
approach,
grammar,
landscape,
narrative,
novels,
picturesque,
print history,
syntax,
typography
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226467665 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2019 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226467979.001.0001 |
