Landscapes

Themes in Environmental History, 2.

Compiled by Sarah Johnson

Landscapes is the second in our new series of environmental history readers, suitable for students. Comprising essays selected from our journals, Environment and History and Environmental Values, each inexpensive paperback volume addresses an important theme in environmental history, combining underlying theory and specific case-studies. Landscapes explores the conceptualisation of environments as landscape, philosophically and historically. Excursions in landscape aesthetics contextualise case studies of landscapes perceived, constructed and responded to, from the plantations of South Africa to the Australian outback, the medieval Ardennes to nuclear-age America. Literary and artistic versions of landscape are studied alongside those driven by policy and pragmatism, probing the intersections of the transcendent and the ideological.

Now also available as a Kindle ebook

LOOK INSIDE THIS BOOK at Amazon.co.uk

Read full text on JSTOR.

‘The fourteen complementary papers in this reader serve to illustrate the inspiringly varied nature of arts, humanities and social science research on landscape, and its interdisciplinary character, whilst also providing a historical perspective on contemporary landscapes and corresponding environmental issues.’

Lucy Veale Environment and History

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Sarah Johnson

Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination
Ronald Hepburn
Aesthetics in Practice: Valuing the Natural World
Emily Brady
Aesthetic and Other Values in the Rural Landscape
John Benson
Admiring the High Mountains: The Aesthetics of Environment
John Haldane
What We Owe the Romantics
Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman
Artists with Axes
Tim Bonyhady
Thomas Pringle’s Plantation
Damian Shaw
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and the Search for a Populist Landscape Aesthetic
Renee Binder and G.W. Burnett
‘Penetrating’ Foreign Lands: Contestations Over African Landscapes. A Case Study from Eastern Zimbabwe
Heike Schmidt
Engineering Miracles: Water Control, Conversion and the Creation of a Religious Landscape in the Medieval Ardennes
Ellen F. Arnold
Environmental History and the Construction of Nature and Landscape: The Case of the ‘Landscaping’ of the Jutland heath
Kenneth R. Olwig
‘Forsaken Spot’ to ‘Classic Ground’: Geological Heritage in Australia and the Recuperative Power of the Deep Past
Kirsty Douglas
‘Welcome to the Atomic Park’: American Nuclear Landscapes and the ‘Unnaturally Natural’
John Wills
Landscape and Ambience on the Urban Fringe: From Agricultural to Imagined Countryside
Joseph Goddard


30 September 2010, Paperback, 300pp.
ISBN 978-1-874267-60-7, £20