6.5 LANDSCAPE WRITING: BIOGRAPHY, MOVEMENT,

PRESENCE AND AFFECT

6.5.1 Landscape writing

If, as the previous section suggested, some recent trends are seemingly working against the continuing salience of landscape as both organising trope and source of creative and productive tension for cultural geographers, then it is equally possible to argue the opposite: in the early years of the twenty-first century studies of landscape are burgeoning, and current work by UK-based geographers is developing new and distinctive approaches to landscape. For example, Chapter 5, Section 5.4 discussed a wide range of recent work in which landscape is reworked via performative and embodied conceptions of tactility, mobility and visuality. This section will look more closely at work which is affiliated to such concerns, but which is further characterised by a focus upon landscape writing. In the wake of insights from poststructural and non-representational theories, it may be argued there is a renewed sense of a need to develop newly critical and creative means of expressing relationships between biography, history, culture and landscape.

Of course, at various points in this book, issues of writing and the self have already loomed large in relation to landscape. The work of early landscape scholars such as Sauer, Hoskins and Jackson has endured, it could be argued, in part because of the distinctively personal quality of their landscape writing, its authority and rhetorical power. Chapter 3, Section 3.5 further discussed approaches in which landscape is more generally conceived as a text, as something written and read. Chapter 4, Section 4.5 also worked through critical literatures in which the verbal and visual depiction of landscape in the context of European travel writing formed a central object of analysis. And Chapter 5, Section 5.4 detailed the varied ways in which embodied practice and performance has been understood as a milieu through which entwined senses of self and landscape emerge.