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Donna Landry's s The Invention From the Countryside is an important contribution to studyregarding literature and also the environment as well as to the social background of the hunt ingreat britan. With insightful readings of countless literary texts, Landry traces divergent attitudes onthe countryside, animals, and hunting from the early modern period towards the nineteenth century.The dates in the subtitle mark the legislative attempts to regulate hunting within the Game Act of1671 as well as its repeal in 1831 (1). Although Landry emphasizes these dates, she frequentlyalludes to events and literary works outside of that temporal framework. As an example, she featuresa chapter about the Victorian writer, R. S. Surtees and cites twentieth-century works also. Thischange in chronology allows her to include interesting material which enhances value of theresearch although with some lack of coherence.

This may not be an anti-hunting book. Indeed, just about the most valuable qualities from theInvention of your Countryside is its increased exposure of the tangible knowledge of hunting. Whileothers might simply dismiss hunting as a cruel sport, Landry investigates the pleasures from thechase. The smells and sounds from the sporting life have full display sniper scope with this book,which is an instructive work for this reason. Here one learns about hounds, harriers, horses, terriersand lurchers and six causes of fox odour (63). Landry highlights that hunters, gamekeepers, andpoachers possessed a expertise in the landscape and of animals that modern conservationists wouldenvy (54).

Hunting was really a common recreation for aristocratic and gentry-class women, as Landryinvestigates in a separate chapter. Accounts by Celia Fiennes, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, andLady Berkeley are included here, together with anecdotes about especially skilled sportswomen.Landry indicates that "hunting did give women agency within a space of movement and pleasure

antithetical to domesticity" (157). And Landry discusses shifting opinions and critical and satiricalreferences to women hunting, though not everybody approved. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess ofNewcastle, for instance, protested from the killing of innocent creatures in their poem "The Huntingof the Hare" (1653), despite the fact that her husband was a avid hunter.

During the entire book, Landry examines the consequences in the landscape of agriculturalpractices, estatedesign and tourism, and urbanization. Within an impressive array of literary texts,Landry includes popular works on rural life like Gervase Markham's Countrey Contentments (1623),William Somervile's The Chace (1735), and Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village (1824), and also thefamiliar Jonson's "To Penshurst" and James Thomson's The Seasons. The concluding chapter onDartmoor a bit-known text by Sophie Dixon with a walking tour of 1830. Unfortunately, with nobibliography, you must hunt down sources with the endnotes.

On the whole, Landry is usually rather difficult on sniper scope writers who criticize the hunt.Discussing Cowper's kindly elegy, "Epitaph with a Hare, "Landry complains, "Although pet-keepingis presented by Cowper because the humane option to field sports, it may sound just like a type ofslavery" (122). Since Cowper's poems up against the slave trade (not mentioned inside the book)were among the finest known about them, it appears to be strange to check him to your slave ownersince he kept pet hares.

Landry also criticizes Wordsworth's "Simon Lee" as being an attack on sporting culture (136), whileto me the poem has always seemed a sniper scope sympathetic account in the huntsman's life. Onone side, Landry applauds field sports for encouraging "a proper desire for close observation ofnature" (103); but, on the other hand, she tries to discredit Wordsworth, although he is the writerwho has done one of the most to help make people appreciate natural world. It really is interestingthat Coleridge presents the better acceptable face of Romantic ecology. Landry praises "The Rime inthe Ancient Mariner" as "one of many greenest of green poems" (141) and devotes a chapter to "ThisLime-Tree Bower My Prison."

Landry has selected several illustrations to talk about alongside the literary texts. It jacket isbeautifully designed, with reproductions of George Morland's "The Benevolent Sportsman" (1792) onthe front cover and Jacques-Laurent Agasse's "Sleeping Fox" (1794) in the back. Both images reflectthe complexities in the http://www.sniperaim.com/ discourse in the hunt. Landry explains why thetitle of Morland's painting will not be the oxymoron one might assume that it is. Similarly, the"Sleeping Fox" looks just like a pet dog one may want to pet, and Landry works with this "paradox,"citing scientific tests in the fox and the fox-hunt that reveal what David Macdonald has known as the"'admiration, almost affection"' that hunters sense of the animal (201). These two images as well asthree other color plates and plenty of white and black illustrations in the book add important visualevidence to the text.

The author's nimble prose makes this an engaging book, from her description of the ha-ha (67) toher analysis of "foxiness" (49). In her own Preface, Landry means current debates on hunting ingreat britan, and she argues persuasively those on both sides in the issue can usually benefit fromstudying hunting in "its full historical complexity--animal, social and ecological" (xviii). Althoughsuch knowledge might not make the acceptance of hunting that Landry favors, her book may no lessthan facilitate dialogue and understanding between opposing sides.