Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life: Memory, Place and the Senses

Bringing together a diverse group of scholars representing the fields of cultural and literary studies, cultural politics and history, creative writing and photography, this collection examines the different ways in which human beings respond to, debate and interact with landscape. How do we feel, sense, know, cherish, memorise, imagine, dream, desire or even fear landscape? What are the specific qualities of experience that we can locate in the spaces in and through which we live? While the essays most often begin with the broadly literary - the memoir, the travelogue, the novel, poetry - the contributors approach the topic in diverse and innovative ways. The collection is divided into five sections: ‘Peripheral Cultures’, dealing with dislocation and imagined landscapes’; ‘Memory and Mobility’, concerning the road as the scene of trauma and movement; ‘Suburbs and Estates’, contrasting American and English spaces; ‘Literature and Place’, foregrounding the fluidity of the fictional and the real and the human and nonhuman; and finally, ‘Sensescapes’, tracing the sensory response to landscape. Taken together, the essays interrogate important issues about how we live now and might live in the future.