John Wylie

"Is landscape the world we are living in, or a scene we are looking at, from afar?" So asks scholar John Wylie in this academic examination of the subject, part of Routledge's Key Ideas in Geography series. He goes on to discuss the various schools of thought, within the field of landscape studies, from those who argue that the observer/observed, self/landscape are inextricably intertwined, to those who think that the concept of landscape requires a certain amount of detachment on the part of the observer, to make sense at all. Wylie examines the work of such figures as Carl Sauer, W.G. Hoskins and J.B. Jackson; he looks at the cultural geography of the 1980s and 90s, and the intersection of geography with various intellectual models: Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical; he explores the landscape literature of the 1990s, and its new cultural geographers; he discusses the phenomenological approach to the subject; and finally, he looks ahead to the future of the field, as seen from his vantage point in 2007...

If the reader is thinking: "I didn't even know Landscape Studies was a thing," they are not alone. I had no idea either, and this is definitely not my area of study. I picked up Wylie's Landscape while working on a paper for my children's literature masters, on the use and significance of place and landscape in two children's novels - Eilís Dillon's The Island of Ghosts and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Although in the end I didn't find it very germane to my topic - I ended up using the idea of the topos put forward in Jane Suzanne Carroll's excellent Landscape in Children's Literature - I am glad to have read it. Reviewing it now, after a number of years have elapsed, I struggle to call to mind some of the specifics of Wylie's analysis - I was aided in the writing by the copious notes I took at the time - but I do recall finding it useful, largely because it expanded my understanding of the complexities involved in how we perceive the world. It is a highly academic book - were it not for that paper, I would likely never have picked it up - so I would probably only recommend it to scholars with a strong interest in the subject.… (mer)