ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a merely transcriptive aesthetic is equally problematic in literary landscapes. The lyric subjectivity that features in landscape writing is perhaps a particular manifestation of a more widespread and important trend in contemporary literature. An experiential articulation of landscape and place circumvents the need to make any such claim: it charts a more circumspect and, in some respects, a more nuanced course through the problems. The related issues of verisimilitude and veracity that are raised by Winfried Georg Sebald's 'picturing' of landscape, and in particular by his engagement with the purported objectivity of photographic recordings of place, play out across a number of references to that medium of representation made by writers featuring in this monograph. For Doreen Massey, 'an insistence on the contemporaneous multiplicity of stories' challenges any notion of 'landscape as a oneness': 'To walk across a landscape with any degree of awareness is to pick way across the locations of host of unfinished trajectories.
