ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the most important traditional genres of literary landscape and discusses some of the contemporary concerns that are reshaping these traditions. Morton and other ecocritics look for a literary representation of landscape that avoids this egotistical quality but still recognises the flow. Landscape allegory uses generic landscape forms to represent virtues, vices, ideas, feelings or political and social entities. An example is the Christian tradition of representing a person's life as a journey, a pilgrimage, on which difficult moral and emotional terrain must be negotiated. Two examples are George Herbert's poem 'The Pilgrimage', from his sequence The Temple, and John Bunyan's novel The Pilgrim's Progress. In the 'prospect poem', a sub-genre of pastoral that was fashionable throughout the eighteenth century, the speaker is dramatically positioned on a hill or other vantage point, looking out upon a landscape.
