The recent discussions of cultural geography have identified that the aesthetics of landscape involves an active, subjective reading of both natural and artificial surroundings. They refuse to define place/space as a mere physical entity and demonstrate that the perception of place is at once identity-related and discursively cultural. With the acknowledgement of the recent development in the field of cultural geography, this paper aims to examine the landscape aesthetics of Englishness in modern British culture and to explore the literary configuration of the national landscape of Englishness in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Graham Swift's Waterland. Both of the novels address the complexity and the power of the experience of landscape and present landscape as a place ideologically registered as the national locale. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day explicitly draws on the English rural idyll in which the landscape of the south of England, with regionally specific images of village greens, hedge rows and rolling hills, becomes a unified landscape type that serves as a yardstick to measure the English landscape. Ishiguro, however, subtly ironizes the profoundly essentialistic and nationalistic assumptions of the landscape ideology in an elegiac memoir of the perfect English butler. While grounding his narrative of Englishness in a symbolic topography of Englishness, Swift's Waterland presents an alternative landscape of East Anglia, a flat, low-lying region of Eastern England, rather than revisiting the long-cherished national terrain of southern England. While the topographical history of the Fens embodies the industrialist and expansionist spirit of the island-nation, the liquid terrain of the Fenland with the simultaneously accretive and erosive drives of water-land registers the precarious postimperiality in the tension of imperiality and insularity.

The recent discussions of cultural geography have identified that the aesthetics of landscape involves an active, subjective reading of both natural and artificial surroundings. They refuse to define place/space as a mere physical entity and demonstrate that the perception of place is at once identity-related and discursively cultural. With the acknowledgement of the recent development in the field of cultural geography, this paper aims to examine the landscape aesthetics of Englishness in modern British culture and to explore the literary configuration of the national landscape of Englishness in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Graham Swift's Waterland. Both of the novels address the complexity and the power of the experience of landscape and present landscape as a place ideologically registered as the national locale. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day explicitly draws on the English rural idyll in which the landscape of the south of England, with regionally specific images of village greens, hedge rows and rolling hills, becomes a unified landscape type that serves as a yardstick to measure the English landscape. Ishiguro, however, subtly ironizes the profoundly essentialistic and nationalistic assumptions of the landscape ideology in an elegiac memoir of the perfect English butler. While grounding his narrative of Englishness in a symbolic topography of Englishness, Swift's Waterland presents an alternative landscape of East Anglia, a flat, low-lying region of Eastern England, rather than revisiting the long-cherished national terrain of southern England. While the topographical history of the Fens embodies the industrialist and expansionist spirit of the island-nation, the liquid terrain of the Fenland with the simultaneously accretive and erosive drives of water-land registers the precarious postimperiality in the tension of imperiality and insularity.