In the Nature of Landscape -Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads (RGS-IBG Book Series)

Landscape is a key topic for a range of academic disciplines, and a matter of strong popular cultural interest and policy concern. This book explores landscape as conceptual bridge for nature and culture, an arena for the co-constitution of society and ecology, a space for the encounter of body and world, a zone for the meeting of human and non-human. The title of the book conveys that it is in the nature of landscape to demand movement across these issues, with landscape performing through varied aesthetics and politics, and demanding an approach to study mixing theoretical analysis and historical and geographical understanding. Through individual chapters In the Nature of Landscape highlights five key themes for understanding cultures of landscape: spatio-temporal narratives of history and origin, conduct and the body, animal landscapes, spaces of experiment, and the spectres of erasure and destruction. The title alludes also to the complex relationship between the terms landscape and nature, an issue present throughout the book.In the Nature of Landscape is the product of extensive empirical research, grounded in the concerns of cultural geography but shaped by work across the humanities and social sciences. Geographical characterisations of landscape as 'duplicity' (Daniels) and 'tension' (Wylie) are developed through landscape as site of conceptual, aesthetic and political negotiation, of conflicts resolved and unresolved. The book is premised upon the need to take geographical specificity seriously, and provides a demonstration of theory through depth empirical work on a specific twentieth century region, the Norfolk Broads, a wetland landscape in eastern England. This is a landscape itself often held to possess hybrid qualities, mixing land and water, subject to marine incursion, standing between ecological states. The single geographical focus makes this also a study in regional cultural landscape, a reemergent theme in geography and related fields via work such as that of Lorimer in Cairngorm, Braun in western Canada and Pearson in Lincolnshire, and connecting to political geographic studies on regional identity by Paasi and others.If regional cultural landscape was a common focus in earlier geographical research, this book revisits the term following the thorough retheorising of each of its constituent terms, and seeks to establish it as a renewed theme for geographical research. In the Nature of Landscape then is a demonstration text for the practice of landscape theory. Throughout the text the argument combines theory, archival research, documentary and visual sources, oral history, and field study, landscape as a theme working between media and modes of enquiry. The book thereby presents a new direction in landscape study, and a model for future research.

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