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The Time of the Landscape

On the Origins of the Aesthetic Revolution

Jacques Rancière author Emiliano Battista translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:John Wiley and Sons Ltd

Published:4th Nov '22

Should be back in stock very soon

This hardback is available in another edition too:

The Time of the Landscape cover

The time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains and lakes in poems or representing them in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and in the meaning of the word “art.” It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for shaping how art is seen and thought, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds together a human community. The time of the landscape is the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common horizon: that of a revolution that no longer concerns only the laws of the state or the norms of art, but the very forms of sensible experience.

This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the humanities generally, and to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy.

“This short, polemical intervention in the history of landscape aesthetics is sure to energize a fresh debate about the relations of painting, architecture, and visual experience in the nineteenth century.”
W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago

“A decisive treatment of the perception and management of nature, The Time of the Landscape contends that the design and management of gardens in the post-revolutionary regime signal a sea-change in the ways we perceive, experience, and shape the world around us.”
Tom Conley, Harvard University

"[E]ngaging historical analysis of modern visual creative practice by one of France’s most prolific and insightful aesthetic and political theorists."
Visual Studies

ISBN: 9781509548149

Dimensions: 218mm x 142mm x 15mm

Weight: 295g

120 pages