Gendering Landscape Art

While gender has been the subject of extensive critical inquiry, the debate has focused primarily on the human, particularly the female, body. The spaces bodies occupy and the ways in which those spaces are depicted in landscape art has not, however, been subject to investigation. This book is the first sustained attempt to fill this gap in art history.

      Using approaches informed by cultural studies, feminism, and psychoanalysis, this collection of essays charts the ways in which artists from the late eighteenth century to the present have used notions of femininity and masculinity to understand and interpret the landscape and how it is represented.

      Various chapters in this volume offer new insights into how issues of gender have impacted on the work of well-known artists such as Monet and Cézanne. Other pieces focus on less familiar examples of landscape art over the past two centuries, from the public displays of monumental landscapes in late-eighteenth-century London, to environmental art projects in present-day New York.

Steven Adams is principal lecturer in critical and cultural studies at the University of Hertfordshire. Anna Gruetzner Robins is lecturer in the history of art at the University of Reading.