Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape

By Trevor J. Barnes

Book Overview

The purpose of this book is to explore issues of geographical description from a poststructuralist sensibility. Focusing on landscape representation, the authors organize their discussion of geographical writings around the three themes of discourse, text and metaphor. Each theme is used as a potential entry point into understanding the shape and substance of particular kinds of geographical writings: the discourse of economics, geopolitics and urban planning, travellers' descriptions, propaganda maps, cartography and geometry, poetry and painting. Representation of the landscape - city, countryside or wilderness - are not mimetic, rather they are a product of the nature of the discourse in which the text is written. Though the landscape representations explored by the authors varies considerably - travellers' accounts of Niagara Falls to Turner's painting of Leeds - each is a written world within a discrete discourse. These essays all participate in the ongoing project of deconstructing geographical discourse to explore the dynamics of power in the representation of landscape.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415069831
• ISBN13: 9780415069830
• Release Date: December 1991
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 2.0" x 8.0"