Tim Fulford examines landscape description in the writings of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Gilpin, Repton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others. He shows how landscape description formed part of a larger debate over the nature of liberty and authority in a Britain developing its sense of nationhood, and reveals the tensions that arose as writers sought to define their relationship to the public sphere. Fulford's innovative study offers a new view of literary and political influence linking the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.