Contemporary Literary Landscapes: The Poetics of Experience

Synopsis

Writing landscapes inevitably occurs in dialogue with a long textual and pictorial tradition, but first-hand experience also provides key stimuli to many writers’ accounts. This monograph employs a comparative lens to offer an intervention in debates between literary scholars who focus on genre and those cultural geographers who are concerned that self-perpetuating literary tropes marginalize practical engagements. Suggesting that representation and experience are not competing paradigms for landscape, Daniel Weston argues that in the hands of contemporary writers they are complementary forces building composite articulations of place. In five case studies, Weston matches a writer to a mode of apprehending place - W.G. Sebald with picturing, Ciaran Carson with mapping, Iain Sinclair with walking, Robert Macfarlane with engaging, Kathleen Jamie with noticing. Drawing out a range of sites at which representation and experience interact, Weston's argument is twofold: first, interaction between traditions of landscape writing and direct experience of landscapes are mutually influential; and second, writers increasingly deploy style, form, and descriptive aesthetics to recover the experience of place in the poetics of the text itself. As Weston shows, emergent landscape writing shuttles across generic boundaries, reflecting the fact that the landscapes traversed are built out of a combination of real and imaginary sources.

Copyright:

2016

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

176 Pages

ISBN-13:

9781317160748

Related ISBNs:

9781315573861, 9780367140533, 9781472474650

Publisher:

Taylor and Francis

Date of Addition:

09/17/23

Copyrighted By:

Routledge

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts, Earth Sciences

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.