During the nineteenth century, large, naturalistic urban parks began to appear in cities around the world. These parks, as Melodramatic Landscapes engagingly demonstrates, offered the opportunity for visitors to assert their social status in performances suited to the theatrical age in which they flourished. How and why did prototypical park landscapes-- characterized by groves of trees, expanses of mowed meadow, man-made lakes artfully designed to emulate their natural counterparts, and meandering paths-- become the norm in the midst of modernizing industrial...