ABSTRACT
Following on directly from the discussions of the previous chapter, this fourth chapter considers the diverse – and diversifying – range of landscape literatures which emerged in anglophone cultural geography through the course of the 1990s. In some ways, therefore, this is an evolutionary story: a story about how a central critical understanding of landscape as a way of seeing – landscape as a visual representation of cultural meaning and power – was extended, critiqued and developed by a generation of geographers emerging in the years following the publication of key texts on landscape by writers such as Cosgrove, Daniels, Duncan and Rose. In particular, the idea that landscape is a ‘gaze’ imbued with Western cultural attitudes and perspectives, a gaze at once contingent yet powerful, is one which has proved durable, productive and lastingly influential.The notion of ‘ways of seeing’, with its critical imbrication of landscape, visuality, power and ideology, remains cogent today.Thus, in part, this chapter will detail how this idea has been used and applied in a series of different geographical and historical contexts. To reiterate points previously stressed, alongside a conception of culture as a signifying system drawn from semiotics, and the widespread adoption of an anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist epistemology, the idea that landscape is best conceived as part of a ‘constructed’ and circulating system of cultural meaning, encoded in images, texts and
discourses, becomes a central theme in what might retrospectively be called the critical-constructivist paradigm of ‘new’ cultural, social and historical geographies.
