The architectural approach. The etymology of "approach" (n. s.) ; The concept of approach (n. s. and v.): the "ancient" and the "modern" lines ; The language of approach (v.): architectural and syntactical design ; The traveler's approach ; The novelist's approach -- The prepositional building. The park gate lodge ; The topographical view: angles and staffage ; A bridge to the next part: "a village on, or across, the Thames" ; The topographical page -- The typographical landscape. The letters on the page ; Fonts ; Capitals and italics ; Catchwords ; Pointing -- The grammar in between. The rise of grammar ; The rise of the preposition ; Clarissa and the little words: the avenue and the approach ; Richardson as printer ; Clarissa and prepositions ; Clarissa as preposition -- The narrative picturesque. Syntactical architecture in textual landscapes ; Bunyan: thinges... included in one word -- Defoe: "in a word" ; Haywood: "in fine, she was undone" ; The narrative picturesque ; Radcliffe and the prepositional phrase ; Burney and the psychological interior ; Austen and the approach to the interior ; Coda a topographical page.
Summary:
In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "approach." In architecture, the term "approach" changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate "through the most interesting part of the grounds," as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it. The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the "lesser parts of speech." The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers' manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines - new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.