Landscape And Power Second Edition

This text considers landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of national and social identities. This edition adds a new preface and five new essays.

Landscapes, whether in pictures or the world, have been viewed as a genre, treated as texts, interpreted as allegory. Landscape and Power goes beyond these approaches to ask not just what landscape "is" or "means" but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice. The original essays in this volume consider landscapes not merely as visual or textual symbols but as sources of social and personal identities. In the opening essay, W. J. T. Mitchell examines the ways in which the concept of landscape functions in the discourse of imperialism, from Chinese imperial landscape to views of contested territory in New Zealand and Israel. The following essays—by Ann Jensen Adams, Ann Bermingham, Elizabeth Helsinger, David Bunn, Joel Snyder, and Charles Harrison—range from Dutch landscape and the formation of national identity to picturesque landscape and the process of political silencing and legitimation. Other topics include Turner's "tourist landscapes" as reflections on the conditions of political representation, American landscape photography and the "professionalizing" of the frontier, "domestic" British landscapes transferred to South Africa in the nineteenth century, and forms of resistance to ideology in modernist landscape painting.

In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley’s travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr’s photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude’s travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence’s travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie’s writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.

Each of the groups that has held political power in Vienna over the past three centuries has left its mark on the city's history, institutions, and architecture. In Landscape and Power in Vienna, Robert Rotenberg shows how such groups--monarchists and republicans, fascists and socialists--also influenced another, equally vital aspect of urban identity in this central European metropolis: the landscape. Working as both a historian and an ethnographer, Rotenberg examines the relationship among human experience, landscape design, and the ideas that design was meant to represent. Understanding this relationship, Rotenberg explains, makes it possible to examine a Viennese garden today and deduce the ideology of those who planted it. From "Gardens of Order" and "Gardens of Liberty," to "Gardens of Reaction" and "Gardens of Renewal," the chapters of Landscape and Power in Vienna show how leaders and citizens shared ideas about landscape emerge in the kinds of gardens they produce. "Landscape itself is a language," Rotenberg concludes. "People learn the meanings of landscape in a city from the landscape itself."

The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent’s physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.

Diaspora studies have tended to privilege urban landscapes over rural ones, wanting to avoid the racial homogeneity, conservatism, and xenophobia usually associated with the latter. This book examines the work of various writers to show how it expresses the appeal that rural and wilderness spaces can hold for the diasporic imagination.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on landscape, from the philosophical to the geographical, with an emphasis on the overarching concept of place. This volume explores the conceptual "topography" of landscape: It examines the character of landscape as itself a mode of place as well as the modes of place that appear in relation to landscape. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines explore the concept of landscape, including its supposed relation to the spectatorial, its character as time-space, its relation to indigenous notions of "country," and its liminality. They examine landscape as it appears within a variety of contexts, from geography through photography and garden history to theology; and more specific studies look at the forms of landscape in medieval landscape painting, film and television, and in relation to national identity. The essays demonstrate that the study of landscape cannot be restricted to any one genre, cannot be taken as the exclusive province of any one discipline, and cannot be exhausted by any single form of analysis. What the place of landscape now evokes is itself a wide-ranging terrain encompassing issues concerning the nature of place, of human being in place, and of the structures that shape such being and are shaped by it.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. All societies fill the geographical space in which they are living with the holy, the sacred, and the supernatural. A lively academic debate has developed in the last few decades about how human beings make the landscapes that they live in and how these landscapes work. This discussion has repeatedly referenced religion and the supernatural, but it has never engaged either in significant depth. Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural: Nordic Perspectives on Landscape Theory presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops these theories further by bringing them into dialogue with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on many different themes, including time and memory, repeating patterns, identity formation, power and subversion, sound, home and unhomeliness, and nature and environment, author Matthias Egeler engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary fields of landscape theory and the study of religions. He brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been documented since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this vibrant heritage with the insights of landscape theory--both in and beyond the study of religions--allows important new contributions to both fields, especially through the inclusion of perspectives held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have been the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the perspectives found in literature and the arts.