Book Details

Landscape

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.

Readers will develop an understanding of landscape as an ensemble of practices that produce, enact and reflect relations between the natural and cultural, the spatial and the social. The book highlights and examines the philosophical positions and critical and political agendas that underpin different understandings of and approaches to landscape. It 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. It examines empirical and materialist approaches to landscape, understandings of landscape as a ‘way of seeing’, work on cultures of landscape, and recent landscape phenomenologies in a focused and accessible engagement with key writings and theorisations of landscape. The final chapter focuses upon current trends and future prospects for cultural geographies of landscape. To aid the student, vignettes are used to highlight key writers, papers and texts. Annotated further reading and student exercises are also included.

This book is an advanced introduction to its topic, presenting an inclusive and flexible understanding of landscape as a manifold of practices - artistic, everyday, political, cultural and economic. Students 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 inquiry, one which offers a platform for future research and writing.

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