This chapter discusses Clare’s nature poetry, in the contexts of the politics of land use, then and now. It reads the verse against issues including the introduction of capitalist forms of agriculture and their effects, including the dispossession and pauperization of agricultural labourers and the degradation of ecosystems. It also considers the politics of language and memory in Clare’s poetry, in relation to changes in the agricultural economy.

This chapter examines Lucian’s manipulation of images of geographical authority in his True Histories, with particular reference to his representation of human and other bodies immersed in their environments. It look first at the tension between detached geographical observation and images of bodily immersion or entanglement with particular landscapes both in imperial Greek literature more broadly, and also in Lucian’s work, where that theme has a particular prominence. That point is illustrated first through discussion of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, which returns repeatedly to images that challenge the idea of a clear dividing line between bodies and their environments, and also between observer and participant status. The second half of the chapter then traces the contrast between detached observation and corporeal immersion through the True Histories, especially in the scenes in the stomach of the whale, from 1.30–2.20, arguing that Lucian in this text undercuts notions of detached geographical authority in ways that are closely related to his comical undermining of various other kinds of intellectual and social pretension in his other works.

Heterogeneity and integrative levels are other aspects of the dialectical approach. In this chapter we elaborate our fundamental argument concerning the landscape nature of biodiversity conservation, emphasizing the role of agroecosystems in evaluating the biodiversity effects of various landscape forms. The fragmentation of natural habitats leads to a heterogeneous landscape where biodiversity conservation depends on how those patches are interconnected at various spatial and temporal scales. We emphasize the ecological nature of the project (e.g., the need to preserve metapopulation structures) and the sociopolitical aspects (small farmer perspectives on nature and biodiversity). We introduce here some more advanced ecological topics such as ephemeral sources and propagating sinks, and note that the recent emphasis on novel ecosystems fits snugly within the agroecological framing of biodiversity conservation.

Island biogeography theory views island species richness as an equilibrium of extinction rates and the immigration rates of novel species to an island. At equilibrium, MacArthur and Wilson’s model predicts that species composition will change over time, but species richness will remain relatively stable. In addition, large islands with low extinction rates and high immigration rates will tend to support more species than will small islands. Geographic ecologists also want to understand why particular species or groups of species have a particular geographic distribution. The theories of continental drift and plate tectonics have helped to resolve these questions. More recently, developments in molecular technology have allowed biogeographers to answer numerous questions about species distributions. Landscape ecology explores how variation in landscape structure, such as configuration or scale, influences the distribution and abundance of species. Conservation ecologists are particularly concerned that industrial, agricultural, and urban development have led to increased fragmentation of habitat that is suitable for sustainable wildlife populations. Applying the lessons of island biogeography, ecologists recommend erecting immigration corridors to increase immigration rates of novel species into nature preserves, thereby increasing species richness.

Chapter 1 focuses on the poem’s symbolic treatment of landscape and reads the Thebaid’s articulation of the relationship between human authority, nature, and wilderness as able to conceptualise power and reflect on important socio-cultural issues of Flavian Rome. While Statius’ praeteritio seems to cut off Ovid’s Theban histories from the poem, Tisiphone’s journey to Thebes, Polynices’ journey to Argos, Tydeus’ embassy to Thebes, Tyresias’ necromancy, and the march of the Argives against Thebes display episodes of destruction of the landscape by natural, divine, and chthonic forces that suggest Statius’ Theban universe being characterised by the same deceptiveness, tendency to chaos, and accessibility to infernal forces of the Metamorphoses’ world. By reworking the spatial narratives deployed by Ovid to critically rewrite the Aeneid’s geopolitical discourse, the Thebaid not only influences our understanding of the Augustan classics, but also provided ancient readers with a chaotic worldview that potentially challenged their perceptions of the narratives of re-established order and providence heralded by the urban and socio-cultural landscapes of Flavian Rome.

Chapter 16 examines the drawings that Goethe produced throughout his life and places his work in its art-historical context. Over the course of the eighteenth century, drawing had come to be seen as an essential artistic technique; Goethe received instruction in drawing in his early years, and from that time on, he drew wherever he was. The chapter analyses the evolution of his work and the shifting influences on it: Dutch art played an important early role, and the inspiration that he received in Italy, including from contemporaries based there, was crucial.

William Morris was among the most prescient of ecological thinkers in Victorian arts and literature and his work offers a searing appraisal of industrialism from within the context of its epochal rise. During this time Britain and its Empire saw major transformations in the natural world and in human relations to it, and living in the context of the first fully fossil-fuel-powered society, Victorian writers and artists were the first to observe the impacts of coal-fired industry and render them into art. Only a few authors, however, including Morris, channelled such observations into a full-throated critique of what was lost and diminished in the process of industrialization. This chapter draws on Mikhail Bakhtin, Amitav Ghosh, and other theorists of narrative to explore how News from Nowhere, The Wood Beyond the World, and other works by Morris draw on older literary depictions of the human place in the natural world. In the longer history of art and literature, landscape and nature were not always conceived as a mere backdrop to human drama, though this was increasingly the tendency in modern literature. Morris’s work challenged this tendency by drawing on older forms to produce an ecological vision that, paradoxically, feels remarkably timely today.

This chapter examines the relationship between Vaughan Williams’s music and ideas of landscape. Although images of landscape and nature have often figured prominently in the reception of Vaughan Williams’s work, closer attention to their historical context reveals that they were highly contested and contingent terms. Vaughan Williams’s preoccupation with landscape hence emerges as a highly productive creative tension throughout his composition output, from his early orchestral tone poems to his final symphony.

This chapter recovers the shifting ways in which landscape occupied the political and aesthetic imaginations of the group of radical liberals with whom Vaughan Williams spent his formative years. This generation of liberals was concerned with bringing the life of the mind directly to bear on the world at hand. It was a worldview that included particular assumptions about the processes of history, the future, and the role of the exceptional individual in the work of social reform, and which was made tangible through an affective relationship with landscape. Walking, cycling, and mountaineering became forms of spiritual exercise within a landscape that was ‘storied’ by family and national histories, and which exhibited the same processes of incremental change that were characteristic of certain liberal approaches to political, legal, and aesthetic reform. The chapter compares Vaughan Williams’s outlook with that of his close friend G. M. Trevelyan in particular, tracing the ways in which both men struggled to adapt their liberal values after the First World War. For Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams, and their liberal intellectual peers, a circumscribed vision of the landscape became emblematic of that feature of English political and legal history that tended towards incremental change, as well as the liberal sense of ‘continuity within change’ that arose as an expression of the importance of personal freedom and of national self-determination.

Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

This chapter examines the countryside of late antique southern Gaul as a context for the development of popular culture at this time, making use of archaeological as well as literary evidence. It covers Provence, with a particular focus on the territorium of the city of Arles, although areas of western Languedoc are also considered due to the exceptional archaeological data available. Key themes and questions arising from recent scholarship are introduced to shape the discussion that follows before the landscape of the region is introduced. The inhabitants of the region are discussed next, in terms of their social and legal status, while the following section considers developments in settlement and social organisation, including the fate of the villa. A detailed look at livelihoods and patterns of productive activity follows. The final section looks at religious structures and landscapes, including the impact of the church in the late antique countryside.

This chapter proposes a new analysis of Mexican Romanticism, from José María Heredia to the Reforma generation. It considers how many of its canonical authors, such as Guillermo Prieto, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and Ignacio Ramírez, write an important part of their production privileging the first-person plural, and thus, effectively make the collective subject central. This We should, in turn, be read in the light of their considerable political agency. This chapter argues that what defines the complex temporality particular to the Romantic poem is that both the I and the We simultaneously pose each other as presupposition. The I can only exist as a singularity that the We is unable to assimilate and thus excretes. Yet, at the same time, it is only through the outside gaze of the person who does not belong to it that a group may crystallize as a true collectivity.

This chapter deals with another group of modernistas, mostly from the Catholic cities of Western Mexico, who are quite different from those examined in Chapter 6. Although they often met with the other group in Mexico City or shared the pages of the Revista Moderna, their approach to modernity is so different that it deserves a separate analysis. Modernismo can be defined by its able incorporation of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Parnassianism, but in the case of this group, there is a scepticism towards several aspects of these aesthetic movements, which always acts as a path that leads back to provincial life, landscape, and a national (and again Catholic) decorum. The authors studied in this chapter include Luis G. Urbina, Enrique González Martínez, Francisco González León, Manuel José Othón, and, in pride of place, Ramón López Velarde.

This chapter focuses on the development of Iberian Christian societies from 1000 to 1500. It deals with the evolution of output, its composition and how it spread across space. Therefore, the study sets out the main chronological and territorial milestones in the Christian economy: (a) the period of growth and expansion of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and that of the crisis and recovery of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; and (b) the areas in which economic activities were carried out, taking into account landscape features and different forms of resource used by agricultural, manufacturing and commercial activities. Throughout the text, it is possible to see that the economic model of Iberia in the Middle Ages coincided with some of the European patterns, although it presented original aspects linked, for example, to the Christian war against al-Andalus, to the demands of military supplies and to the role of the spoils of war in the construction of individual and collective fortunes. On the whole, however, the results of economic development were remarkable and do not support the undoubtedly hasty images of Iberia as a peripheral region, located in the extreme south-west of the European continent.

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.

Edward Lane’s view of the northern Delta, first drafted in 1829, describes a desolate, marginal landscape – difficult to get to and lacking in reasons to do so. This view has remained largely unchallenged by Egyptologists for a long time. This chapter puts the north of Egypt at its centre and discusses in particular when and how this region was used. First, we discuss the landscapes of the northern Delta, their diachronic development and the geographic work investigating this part of Egypt. Second, there is an overview of the state of archaeological research in this region. The reasons for the scientific lack of interest for this region in Egyptology will be addressed. Next, we introduce the historiographical hypothesis, which suggests that under the Ptolemies the northern Delta was an area of land reclamation, comparable to what was achieved in the Faiyum. A case study is presented of a region in the central northwestern Delta, which was investigated in a multidisciplinary combination of archaeological surveys, geophysical work on the ground and analysis of remote sensing data. Based on the preliminary results, a reconstruction of the ancient landscape and settlement history is proposed, and the historiographical hypothesis refuted.