Joan Coutu – författare

Politics has always been at the heart of the English country house, in its design and construction, as well as in the activities and experiences of those who lived in and visited these places. As Britain moved from an agrarian to an imperial economy over the course of the eighteenth century, the home mirrored the social change experienced in the public sphere. This collection focuses on the relationship between the country house and the mutable nature of British politics in the eighteenth century. Essays explore the country house as a stage for politicking, a vehicle for political advancement, a symbol of party allegiance or political values, and a setting for appropriate lifestyles. Initially the exclusive purview of the landed aristocracy, politics increasingly came to be played out in the open, augmented by the emergence of career politicians – usually untitled members of the patriciate – and men of new money, much of it created on Caribbean plantations or in the employ of the East India Company. Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 reveals how, during this period of profound change, the country house remained a constant. The country house was the definitive tangible manifestation of social standing and, for the political class, owning one became almost an imperative. In its consideration of the country house as lived and spatial experience, as an aesthetic and symbolic object, and as an economic engine, this book offers a new perspective on the complexity of political meaning embedded in the eighteenth-century country house – and on ourselves as active recipients and interpreters of its various narratives, more than two centuries later.

The classical architectural and planning schemes conceived by Canada’s Anglo-settler elite in the early twentieth century embodied a prescriptive vision of power and grandeur for the country and its people on a scale almost unimaginable today. This provocative collection of essays examines the classical design precepts that shaped much of Canada’s built environment – leaving an imprint for how we continue to experience place today.Classicism in Canada brings together essays by planning, architectural, art, political, and social historians. Drawing on primary sources and the physical sites themselves, the contributors probe the meaning of a style that melded the École des Beaux-Arts with the sensibilities of the City Beautiful movement and that was rooted in assumptions about order and historical continuity. The transformation of built space and land was motivated by pragmatism, aesthetics, and an ideological infrastructure that reverberated with utopian zeal as much as it was driven by racial discrimination and Indigenous erasure. The book analyzes cities, towns, banks, parks, and tourist sites while also offering a microhistory of Hamilton, Ontario, a case study par excellence where municipal officials, planners, and architects pursued so-called improvements to the expanding industrial city.Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images and framed through spatial, social, and decolonial perspectives, Classicism in Canada shows how building and planning aimed to shape a place for Canada within the British imperial fold.