Landscape

Substantially revised and re-written to take into account contemporary and emergent developments in the field, this 2nd edition of Landscape articulates a fresh and expanded set of concepts and arguments for landscape researchers across disciplines. A core concept for cultural geography for almost a hundred years, landscape is also an inherently mutli-disciplinary concept. Issues of landscape have become prominent anew in recent work in the literary, visual and performing arts, in social and cultural anthropology, and archaeology/material culture studies. Landscape explores the critical creative tensions of the landscape concept across these domains. Retaining its primarily focus upon work in cultural geography, this new edition of Landscape also extends its range further to explore linkages and cross-fertilisations across a range of academic disciplines. In this context, attention also focuses upon the competing and at times conflicting research agendas which have been used to both define and explore landscape. Throughout, the critical and conceptual agendas which underpin and inspire different schools of landscape research are examined in detail. The new edition begins by exploring the emergence of the modern landscape concept in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It goes on to examine visual and ideological readings of landscape. It focuses subsequently on landscape understood in terms of substantive custom, material production and discursive practices. A substantially expanded chapter then chronicles the recent cross-disciplinary rise of phenomenological, relational and corporeal accounts of landscape. The book concludes by examining current work on landscape and memory, and landscape as performance, and offers a critical assessment of landscape's future role as an organising concept. Landscape continues to offer an advanced introduction to its topic. Students and practitioners across disciplines will find an indispensable guide to a key contemporary concept. Researchers and scholars will discover both critical synthesis and a forward-looking prospectus for future landscape research.