Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life

Bringing together literary and cultural studies scholars, historians, artists and creative writers, this collection examines the different ways in which human beings respond to, debate and interact with landscape. While the essays most often begin with the broadly literary - the memoir, the travelogue, the novel, poetry - the contributors approach the topic in diverse and innovative ways. Taken together, the essays interrogate important issues about how we live now and might live in the future.

Part 1 Peripheral Cultures: 'You're not in Ireland now': landscape and loss in Irish women's poetry. At some distance from the Scottish mainland: urban television producers and Hebridean Islands. Part 2 Memory and Mobility: Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash shrines. Speed and stillness: driving in the countryside. Part 3 Suburbs and Estates: Doomed developments in the desert: re-reading land development, the American family and ordinary places in a time of 'cruel optimism'. A child in the suburb. At once irrational and objective: photography's construction of place. Part 4 Literature and Place: 'Other than they were': fair places full of folk. Great plains' vernacular: why spatial idiolect matters. 'The last pure place on earth': Antarctic affect in Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica and Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita. Plots: the narrative of place in contemporary nature writing. Part 5 Sensescapes: Dancing - worlding the beach: revealing connections through phenomenological movement inquiry. Listening at home. In-between places: envisioning and accessing new landscapes.