When Clare Leighton (1898–1989) engraved illustrations for her 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1872), she said: “I was Egdon Heath, feeling the hooves of the cropper ponies and the turn of the undergrowth.” She was this land, that road, those flowers. She was precisely in the place of Hardy’s book, embracing the layering of the fictional and real that her act of creation entailed. The passage of time and the trauma of World War I might have suggested a need for nostalgia, but Leighton’s images of a prewar, preindustrial landscape were very much rooted in the present. She took Hardy’s England as a telescope into a rural, land-based life that she further explored in her accounts of creating a working garden and farm, Four Hedges (1935) and Country Matters (1937). Of particular interest is the way that she treated her full-sized illustrations, which were narrative and text-based, and her head- and tailpieces, which were more observational. The alchemy of these two kinds of images mimicked Hardy’s plotting, which also oscillated between character and landscape.

The relationship between landscape and place names is very strong. In ancient times, places were named after natural resources and the landscape’s hydro-geo-morphological features. This trend persists today in some contexts. For instance, Abui place names on Alor Island are named after important landscape features, agricultural and horticultural crops, and useful plants. Abui toponyms are compounded with lexemes describing human settlements and highlighting the close relationship between nature and man. This chapters shows how the analysis of the landscape and related disciplines, like landscape archaeology (the study of the past use of the landscape determined by archaeological findings), enable scholars to reconstruct the remote origins of toponyms both in Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. While landscape is often considered in association with the physical features of a territory, the authors call for a holistic view of the landscape itself, which blends physical, social, cultural, environmental, and religious dimensions. To this end, toponyms are useful tools providing the researchers with insights into how people use or used the landscape.

This chapter continues the biography, picking it up at the moment when, in 2009, he met the author of this book and we decided that the book needed to be written. The chapter describes our journeys together, especially our two ascents of the holy mountain of N’kamba. It also describes the importance of this mountain for Kimbanguists and beyond and offers theoretical reflections on landscape and prophecy.

Ch 4: Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale and Un coeur simple are the subject of the fourth chapter, which examines the various ways in which the lyric representation of landscape can convey human happiness: an activity of free movement, as well as the creation of intimacy through spatial effects. This is a way of placing lyric effects outside the self, making it available to a reader who can reenact the imagining of happiness. This occurs despite Flaubert’s famous pessimism. Realism, which is so often connected to this attitude, achieves a kind of guide to how we can think of happiness.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the US East Coast. Roy Harris was one of several young Americans who studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; Symphony 1933 was his breakthrough work after returning home. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who anecdotally asked for a ‘big symphony from the West’, Symphony 1933 teases out the relationships between those expansionist discourses associated with the symphony indicated by Paul Bekker (1918), liberal ideology, and the imagined spaces of the American West. Examining the reception of Symphony 1933 and its music, the chapter raises questions about how the discourse around Harris’s symphony and liberalism’s spatial narratives colluded in establishing the political hegemony of white Americans and the supposed naturalness of their right to occupy the West, an acute anxiety given the disenfranchisement of white working-class Americans during the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

A rich and varied corpus of written material has survived from medieval Ireland, much of it concerned with providing an extended account of Ireland’s past. Through the technology of writing, a constructed history was created in which the art of writing itself functioned as process and as theme. Inscriptions and manuscripts bear witness to the mechanics of writing, while the development of letters and language is explored in origin-stories in significant ways. The power of the word was important, but so was control of the landscape, ordering society, taming space. Land-clearing, building settlements, and refining tools form a prominent strand in the account of Ireland’s beginnings, particularly in medieval Irish narratives of place; how fire was mastered; when and why were mills introduced. In explaining the past and so shaping the present, the technology of writing presented a story of technologies of other kinds, a selection of which is presented in this chapter on technology, writing, and place in medieval Irish literature.

This chapter considers the network of poets orientated around the Georgian Poetry publications that appeared in a series from 1912 to 1922, edited by the influential literary and artistic champion Edward Marsh. It discusses the innovations advanced by contributing writers even as they consciously adhered to a lyric inheritance that stressed continuity over rupture. With some exceptions, it argues that these poets relied on a pastoral palate to articulate complex emotional and sensical realities while they contended – implicitly and, more rarely, explicitly – with the jarring physical and psychological assaults of the First World War. Finally, it addresses the ways in which the editors and established contributors used the publication as a platform to promote emerging and important literary voices, including the likes of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

Introduces St Osyth, Essex: its history and landscape, and explains the context and setting of the witchcraft accusations of 1582.

This chapter argues that the East Anglian Fens, a 1,500-square-mile diamond of flat, low-lying land given over largely to agriculture, are a perfect test case for thinking about georgic at the level of landscape. An ancient landscape that seems to forbid organic metaphor, the Fens can seem like perpetually un-reclaimed literary ground. Yet since Caryl Churchill’s Fen (1982) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) contemporary authors have found a more involving territory there than in more conventionally literary landscapes in the Lakes, the Yorkshire Moors or the Wessex uplands. The history of the Fens places often remote and lonely agricultural lives in a setting shaped by mighty human efforts against huge natural forces, especially those of river and sea. In the fens it is easy for georgic writing to lose its human scale. Here both farmer and writer must make a reckoning with everything that the landscape has excluded.

The preface introduces some of the main themes of the book and acknowledges funding and support.

This chapter examines the music created by Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother, under the band names Cluster and Harmonia. It makes the case that this music exists in a different relation to post-war Germany than that of Kraftwerk or Neu. Cluster/Harmonia created music deeply informed by the rural setting in which the musicians worked; in doing so, they engaged with one of the archetypal signifiers of German identity – the German landscape. The improvisatory nature of their work both allowed them to respond directly to the influence of their environment, but also created a template that proved very influential – not least on the work of Brian Eno (who collaborated with them in the mid-1970s).

Taking conflicts over new solar energy projects on the agricultural landscape in the global North as its backdrop, the chapter demonstrates how work and labour (including that performed in the North by workers from the global South) are erased both by the opponents and the proponents of such projects. The erasure is consistent with prevailing ways of knowing the human-environment nexus, shaped by an underlying political economy derivative of how international law has constructed and maintained the foundational liberal mythology that separates labour from land. Grounded in our commitment to pursuing a ‘just transition’ to decarbonisation – that is to say, a transition that attends to the distributional effects and disproportionate impacts of decarbonisation on workers and communities – we strive to reconceptualise work and labour as embodied practices of working and living on the land. Everyday socio-spatial practices structured by law implicate ordinary people in the making of landscapes and continuing relations of settler capitalism, shaping how ‘we’ live together on the land, including who belongs and who gets to decide.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

Ancient Greek philosophy has often been dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary environmental thought or part of the problem in environmental terms because of its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism; Plato is often seen as emblematic of this philosophical stance. Following the research of Timothy Mahoney, this chapter calls into question this characterisation of Plato’s philosophy. Additionally, it examines the environmental perspectives of several philosophers within the later Platonic tradition, whose philosophy was closely connected with ancient Mediterranean religions and has been largely marginalised and excluded from the canon of western philosophy. This chapter argues that there is an important strand in ancient philosophy which is participatory, relational and ecocentric, depicting the philosopher as rooted in place and landscape, and necessitating the philosopher’s recognition of the interconnectedness and sacredness of the natural world and the kinship and ensouled nature of all beings and natural entities. As such, this chapter suggests that ecocentric environmental perspectives can be discerned within Platonism (especially within late antique theurgy) and that, consequently, this strand of ancient philosophy has a great deal to offer to environmental ethics and contemporary environmental thinking on nature and the natural world.