2009 Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award"Ruined by Design provides a brilliant analysis of the philosophical shift from reason and order toward imagination and feeling in both landscape innovations and literary experimentation during the eighteenth century." -Laurie Kaplan, George Washington University“Inger Brodey's ambitiously cross-disciplinary study of artful ruins, mainly in gardens and in novels, offers insights that should delight and edify readers with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Very few studies that I know so successfully make sense of sensibility.” -Peter Graham, Clifford Cutchins Professor of English, Virginia Tech“Inger Brodey has written a book of remarkable vitality about the fascination with ruins across eighteenth-century Europe. The book is both interdisciplinary and international. Instead of focusing on a single field like poetry, painting, or garden design in isolation, she uncovers their shared penchant for fragmentation which defines the culture of sensibility. Few authors writing on the fashion of ruins have penetrated this well-known phenomenon so deeply and intelligently.” -Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Professor, University of Chicago"Ruined by Design is remarkable for the breadth and depth of its analysis as well as for the clarity and precision of its language."-Susan Allen Ford, Professor of English at Delta State University
