Landscape Poetics

Reassesses Scottish textual practice in the context of the natural and post-natural landscapes

• Covers a range of the relationships between landscape, literature, and culture
• Explores the lived relationship between form, content, and consciousness
• Provides a phenomenological study of the intertwining of self and world, subject and landscape

Landscape Poetics is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to place Scottish writers in relation to their landscape, by investigating how the self is entwined in place. By examinining the writing and practice of particular modern and contemporary authors in the light of environmental thought, the study explores their lived, organic connection to the landscape. Landscape Poetics presents an argument that the relationship between author and world is expressed through the language of vibrant and engaged experience. Shepherd, MacCaig, Jamie, Clark and Finlay are seen as reinventing the perception of the landscape by proposing that the subject is no longer involved in the act of objectification, but is instead an embodied self that enters place, perceiving it more fully.