ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to negotiate a series of related fields of tensions. Insofar as they lent weight to the valorization of Britain's mountainous areas, it takes on some of the tensions, disjonctions and ambiguities generated within polite society, between image and counterimage of London, agricultural/industrial revolutions and the English Romantic Movement, and between England and Britain. Foregrounding landscape allows for another entryway into and between the interactive fields of tension - the social forces - that surrounded the rise of cultural nationalisms and the production of a centralizing nation-state. Cultural nationalism was oppositional to the rhetoric of progress and improvement, but Picturesque touring allowed the marketplace to incorporate landscapes of regional resistance.
