Mapping the Invisible Landscape

Mapping the Invisible Landscape PDF Author: Kent C. Ryden
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 9781587292088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Any landscape has an unseen component: a subjective component of experience, memory, and narrative which people familiar with the place understand to be an integral part of its geography but which outsiders may not suspect the existence ofOCounless they listen and read carefully. This invisible landscape is make visible though stories, and these stories are the focus of this engrossing book. Traveling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent RydenOCohimself a most careful listener and readerOCoasks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings? Our sense of any place, he argues, consists of a deeply ingrained experiential knowledge of its physical makeup; an awareness of its communal and personal history; a sense of our identity as being inextricably bound up with its events and ways of life; and an emotional reaction, positive or negative, to its meanings and memories. Ryden demonstrates that both folk and literary narratives about place bear a striking thematic and stylistic resemblance. Accordingly, "Mapping the Invisible Landscape" examines both kinds of narratives. For his oral materials, Ryden provides an in-depth analysis of narratives collected in the Coeur d'Alene mining district in the Idaho panhandle; for his consideration of written works, he explores the OC essay of place, OCO the personal essay which takes as its subject a particular place and a writer's relationship to that place. Drawing on methods and materials from geography, folklore, and literature, "Mapping the Invisible Landscape" offers a broadly interdisciplinary analysis of the way we situate ourselves imaginatively in the landscape, the way we inscribe its surface with stories. Written in an extremely engaging style, this book will lead its readers to an awareness of the vital role that a sense of place plays in the formation of local cultures, to an understanding of the many-layered ways in which place interacts with individual lives, and to renewed appreciation of the places in their own lives and landscapes."

Mapping the Invisible Landscape

Mapping the Invisible Landscape PDF Author: Kent C. Ryden
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 9781587292088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
Any landscape has an unseen component: a subjective component of experience, memory, and narrative which people familiar with the place understand to be an integral part of its geography but which outsiders may not suspect the existence ofOCounless they listen and read carefully. This invisible landscape is make visible though stories, and these stories are the focus of this engrossing book. Traveling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent RydenOCohimself a most careful listener and readerOCoasks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings? Our sense of any place, he argues, consists of a deeply ingrained experiential knowledge of its physical makeup; an awareness of its communal and personal history; a sense of our identity as being inextricably bound up with its events and ways of life; and an emotional reaction, positive or negative, to its meanings and memories. Ryden demonstrates that both folk and literary narratives about place bear a striking thematic and stylistic resemblance. Accordingly, "Mapping the Invisible Landscape" examines both kinds of narratives. For his oral materials, Ryden provides an in-depth analysis of narratives collected in the Coeur d'Alene mining district in the Idaho panhandle; for his consideration of written works, he explores the OC essay of place, OCO the personal essay which takes as its subject a particular place and a writer's relationship to that place. Drawing on methods and materials from geography, folklore, and literature, "Mapping the Invisible Landscape" offers a broadly interdisciplinary analysis of the way we situate ourselves imaginatively in the landscape, the way we inscribe its surface with stories. Written in an extremely engaging style, this book will lead its readers to an awareness of the vital role that a sense of place plays in the formation of local cultures, to an understanding of the many-layered ways in which place interacts with individual lives, and to renewed appreciation of the places in their own lives and landscapes."

Sum of the Parts

Sum of the Parts PDF Author: Kent C Ryden
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Proponents of the new regional history understand that regional identities are constructed and contested, multifarious and not monolithic, that they involve questions of dominance and power, and that their nature is inherently political. In this lively new book, writing in the spirit of these understandings, Kent Ryden engagingly examines works of American regional writing to show us how literary partisans of place create and recreate, attack and defend, argue over and dramatize the meaning and identity of their regions in the pages of their books. Cleverly drawing upon mathematical models that complement his ideas and focusing on both classic and contemporary literary regionalists, Ryden demonstrates that regionalism, in the cultural sense, retains a great deal of power as a framework for literary interpretation. For New England he examines such writers as Robert Frost and Hayden Carruth, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Edith Wharton, and Carolyn Chute and Russell Banks to demonstrate that today’s regionalists inspire closer, more democratic readings of life and landscape. For the West and South, he describes Wallace Stegner’s and William Faulkner’s use of region to, respectively, exclude and evade or confront and indict. For the Midwest, he focuses on C. J. Hribal, William Least Heat-Moon, Paul Gruchow, and others to demonstrate that midwesterners continually construct the past anew from the materials at hand, filling the seemingly empty midlands with history and significance. Ryden reveals that there are many Wests, many New Englands, many Souths, and many Midwests, all raising similar issues about the cultural politics of region and place. Writing with appealing freshness and a sense of adventure, he shows us that place, and the stories that emerge from and define place, can be a source of subversive energy that blunts the homogenizing force of region, inscribing marginal places and people back onto the imaginative surface of the landscape when we read it on a place-by-place, landscape-by-landscape, book-by-book basis.

Deep Map Country

Deep Map Country PDF Author: Susan Naramore Maher
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803255039
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Taking its name from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth (a deep map), the "deep-map" form of nonfiction and environmental writing defines an innovative and stratigraphic literary genre. Proposing that its roots can be found in Great Plains nonfiction writing, Susan Naramore Maher explores the many facets of this vital form of critique, exploration, and celebration that weaves together such elements of narrative as natural history, cultural history, geography, memoir, and intertextuality. Maher's Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities.

From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning

From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning PDF Author: Bärbel Tress
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402039782
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This book provides guidelines for those pursuing landscape projects based on integrative concepts – interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity – whether they are members of an integrative research team or individuals working on a problem that demands integration. They must define terminology, choose appropriate methodologies, overcome epistemological barriers and cope with the high expectations of some stakeholders while encouraging others to participate at all.

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge PDF Author: Jon K. Lauck
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.

Landscapes of Clearance

Landscapes of Clearance PDF Author: Angele Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315425599
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This volume examines landscapes that have been cleared of inhabitants—for economic, environmental, or socio-political reasons, by choice or by force—and the social impacts of clearance on their populations. Using cases from five continents, and ranging from prehistoric, through colonial and post-colonial times, the contributors show landscapes as meaningful points of contestation when populations abandon them or are exiled from them. Acts of resistance and revitalization are also explored, demonstrating the social and political meaning of specific landscapes to individuals, groups, and nations, and how they help shape cultural identity and ideology.Sponsored by the World Archaeological Congress

Landscape With Figures

Landscape With Figures PDF Author: Kent C. Ryden
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587294060
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Kent Ryden does not deny that the natural landscape of New England is shaped by many centuries of human manipulation, but he also takes the view that nature is everywhere, close to home as well as in more remote wilderness, in the city and in the countryside. InLandscape with Figures he dissolves the border between culture and nature to merge ideas about nature, experiences in nature, and material alterations of nature. Ryden takes his readers from the printed page directly to the field and back again-. He often bypasses books and goes to the trees from which they are made and the landscapes they evoke, then returns with a renewed appreciation for just what an interdisciplinary, historically informed approach can bring to our understanding of the natural world. By exploring McPhee's The Pine Barrens and Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, the coastal fiction of New England, surveying and Thoreau's The Maine Woods,Maine's abandoned Cumberland and Oxford Canal, and the natural bases for New England's historical identity, Ryden demonstrates again and again that nature and history are kaleidoscopically linked.

Unfolding Irish landscapes

Unfolding Irish landscapes PDF Author: Derek Gladwin
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1784996521
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
This is the first scholarly edited collection devoted to the work of the Anglo-Irish writer and cartographer Tim Robinson

Constructions of Space IV

Constructions of Space IV PDF Author: Mark K. George
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0567325903
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Critical studies and analyses of space are becoming increasingly common in scholarship, although it is not always clear how such studies proceed, what theoretical works inform them, or what are their potential benefits for biblical studies. This volume helps address those questions, by including the work of biblical scholars working in a range of historical periods and locations, from Deuteronomy's idealized spaces to the Qumran community on the shores of the Dead Sea. Each of the scholars in this volume is actively involved in the critical study of space, having presented work on this topic in regional, national, or international meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. The essays included in this volume combine theoretical and interpretive concerns in the analysis of texts from the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars in Biblical Studies, Archaeology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology will find this to be a valuable resource for gaining new understandings of the critical study of space in antiquity.

European Rural Landscapes

European Rural Landscapes PDF Author: Hannes Palang
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306485125
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
This book, a compendium of 28 papers selected from two recent conferences on the topic, focuses on aspects of rural landscape, broadly related to issues of language, representation and power. These are issues that have not been addressed on a pan-European landscape level before.The aim is to offer a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of historical and contemporary processes in European landscapes.