ABSTRACT
Questions about words and their place in the world have increasingly been raised and discussed in human geography. This chapter begins by exploring written words in material geographies, and asking how people read the landscapes in which they live. It then turns to geographical texts, examining geographical descriptions and asking what such descriptions achieve, theoretically and politically, and how they achieve it. Some of the richest geographical data – information about landscape, place and nature, the country and the city – are found in imaginative literature. A classic example of the literary portrayal of landscape and a region is found in the work of Thomas Hardy, who set most of his novels and short stories in a fictionalized version of nineteenth-century southwest England. Geographical description can be the vehicle for experimenting with new ways of seeing. Geographies of writing, shaped not only by authors but also by readers, can sometimes close down political agendas but sometimes open them up.
