Locating the beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic: spatially analysing the application of aesthetic terminology in descriptions of the English Lake District

A spatially analytical approach reveals that eighteenth-century aesthetic terms—beautiful, picturesque, sublime, and majestic—were not uniformly distributed across the English Lake District but instead clustered around specific landscapes, reflecting their historical conceptualization. This study demonstrates how travel writing and topographical literature from the 18th and 19th centuries reinforced these aesthetic associations, particularly through ephemeral publications like guidebooks that popularized the vocabulary of canonical thinkers such as William Gilpin and Edmund Burke. The research combines corpus analysis, geoparsing, and GIS to map the geographical distribution of these terms in a 1.5-million-word dataset, offering new insights into the interplay between aesthetics, literature, and physical geography.

Donaldson, C., Gregory, I. N., & Taylor, J. E. (2017). Locating the beautiful, picturesque, sublime and majestic: spatially analysing the application of aesthetic terminology in descriptions of the English Lake District. Journal of Historical Geography, 56, 43–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.01.006