Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Lifescapes
  • Cited by 1
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
April 2023
Print publication year:
2023
Online ISBN:
9781009199858
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009199858
Subjects:
Social and Population History, Twentieth Century British History, British History after 1450, History
Series:
Modern British Histories
Information

Book description

Why does landscape matter to us? We rarely articulate the often highly individual ways it can do so. Drawing on eight remarkable unpublished diaries, Jeremy Burchardt demonstrates that responses to landscape in modern Britain were powerfully affected by personal circumstances, especially those experienced in childhood and youth. Four major patterns are identified: 'Adherers' valued landscape for its continuity, 'Withdrawers' for the refuge it provides from perceived threats, 'Restorers' for its sustaining of core value systems, and 'Explorers' for its opportunities for self-discovery and development. Lifescapes sets out a new approach to landscape history based on comparative biography and deep contextualization, which has far-reaching implications. It foregrounds family structures and relationships and the psychological dynamics they generate. These, it is argued, were usually a more decisive presence in landscape encounters than wider cultural patterns and forces. Seen in this way, landscape can be understood as a mirror reflecting our innermost selves and the psychosocial influences shaping our development. This is a compelling and original study of the relationship between individual lives and landscapes.

Reviews

‘This is an important - and genuinely affecting - book. By focusing on how landscape was lived, made sense of, and imagined by eight ‘ordinary’ women and men, Burchardt offers a vital rethinking of what landscape means and does in everyday life. The result is a compelling account that artfully demonstrates how, in a period of rapid urbanisation, the countryside and the natural world remained keystones of identity, wellbeing and hope.’

Carl Griffin - author of The Politics of Hunger: Protest, poverty and policy in England, c. 1750-c. 1840

‘Lifescapes explores the profound role of rural landscape in the lives of ordinary people. It offers a ‘deep history of landscape’ - a history attentive less to abstract cultural discourse than personal, affective, real-life experience. Few books have the potential genuinely to be described as field-defining. This is one of them.’

Paul Readman - author of Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity

‘Lifescapes offers a deep history of landscape by revealing how people remembered and traced their lives in relation to the landscapes and places in which they lived. Exploring the life-histories of eight diarists living in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, Burchardt reveals the value and richness of undertaking a biographical approach to landscape history. His work makes a significant contribution to understanding our emotional attachments to landscapes in the past, while raising important questions on how we dwell and find meaning in landscapes today.’

Nicola Whyte - author of Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.