Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape

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.