Landscapes

About this book

Landscapes is the second in a series of environmental history readers, suitable for students and researchers. Comprising essays selected from our journals, Environment and History and Environmental Values, each collection 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.

Contents

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

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