Publisher's Synopsis
The purpose of this book is to explore issues of geographical description from a poststructuralist sensibility. Focusing on landscape representation, the authors organize their discussion of geographical writings around the three themes of discourse, text and metaphor. Each theme is used as a potential entry point into understanding the shape and substance of particular kinds of geographical writings: the discourse of economics, geopolitics and urban planning, travellers' descriptions, propaganda maps, cartography and geometry, poetry and painting. Representation of the landscape - city, countryside or wilderness - are not mimetic, rather they are a product of the nature of the discourse in which the text is written. Though the landscape representations explored by the authors varies considerably - travellers' accounts of Niagara Falls to Turner's painting of Leeds - each is a written world within a discrete discourse. These essays all participate in the ongoing project of deconstructing geographical discourse to explore the dynamics of power in the representation of landscape.;This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in geography, cultural studies and sociology.
