E-Book Overview
<EM>Landscape is a stimulating introduction to and contemporary understanding of one of the most important concepts within human geography. A series of different influential readings of landscape are debated and explored, and, for the first time, distinctive traditions of landscape writing are brought together and examined as a whole, in a forward-looking critical review of work by cultural geographers and others within the last twenty to thirty years. This book clearly and concisely explores ‘landscape’ theories and writings, allowing students of geography, environmental studies and cultural studies to fully comprehend this vast and complex topic.
To aid the student, vignettes are used to highlight key writers, papers and texts. Annotated further reading and student exercises are also included. For researchers and lecturers, <EM>Landscape presents a forward-looking synthesis of hitherto disparate fields of inquiry, one which offers a platform for future research and writing.
E-Book Content
LANDSCAPE Landscape is a central theme of cultural geography, and the past twentyfive years have been an unprecedentedly fertile period for work in this area, with a series of different influential readings of landscape being debated and explored. Here, for the first time, distinctive traditions of landscape writing are brought together and examined as a whole, in a forwardlooking critical review of work by cultural geographers and others.The book also presents readers with an understanding of landscape couched in terms of the tensions inherent in the concept.These tensions, the book argues, are creative and productive, provoking new agendas for geographical research on landscape. Thus, this book is about the varied and sometimes competing and opposed ways in which cultural geographers and others have understood and defined landscape over the past twenty-five years. Chapter by chapter, it reviews and discusses examples of the types of research and writing that spring from different understandings and definitions of landscape. And in doing so it also highlights and examines the philosophical positions and critical and political agendas that underpin different understandings of and approaches to landscape. The book examines in turn empirical and materialist approaches to landscape, understandings of landscape as a ‘way of seeing’, work on cultures of landscape and recent landscape phenomenologies. Throughout, the interdisciplinary nature of landscape studies is also stressed, with work from art history, archaeology and visual and cultural theory discussed alongside that by cultural geographers.The final chapter focuses upon current trends and future prospects for cultural geographies of landscape. Landscape is an advanced introduction to its topic. Student readers will find a thorough, informative and up-to-date account of one of the cardinal points of human geography. For researchers and lecturers, Landscape presents a forward-looking synthesis of hitherto disparate fields of enquiry, one which offers a platform for future research and writing. John Wylie is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Earth Resources at the University of Exeter. Praise for Landscape This book synthesises earlier ideas and presents current thinking in an accessible form . . . an excellent contribution to the theoretical study of landscape. Brian Short, University of Sussex Very well written, very accessible, and easy to read quickly. A pleasure, in fact. Richard H. Schein, University of Kentucky Key Ideas in Geography SERIES EDITORS: SARAH HOLLOWAY, LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY AND GILL VALENTINE, LEEDS UNIVERSITY The Key Ideas in Geography series will provide strong, original and accessible texts on important spatial concepts for academics and students working in the fields of