Full Description
This collection of essays aims to investigate the complex issues surrounding contemporary cultural discourses on land and identity - their production, construction, and reconstruction across a range of different texts and materials. The chapters offer disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches opening up discussion and new routes for research in a number of interrelated areas such as Countryside vs. City, Diaspora, Landscapes of Memory and Trauma, Migrational Spaces, and Ecology. They represent a number of innovative contemporary responses to how concepts of land intersect and dialogue with notions of identity across and between regions, nations, races, and cultures. Through employing interdisciplinary methods and theories drawn from diverse sources, such as cultural studies, spatial theory, philosophy and literary theory, the chapters chart varied and complex themes of identity formation in relation to spatiality.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson: Introduction: Framing and Reframing Land and Identity
Land and Identity: Theories and Philosophies
David Crouch: Landscape, Land and Identity: A Performative Consideration
Fran Speed: Nature Qua Identity: Nature, Culture and Relational Integrity
Donna Landry: The Geopolitical Picturesque
Landscapes of Memory: Eschatology, Trauma, and Diaspora
Kirby Farrell: Eschatological Landscape
Jenni Adams: Cities Under a Sky of Mud: Landscapes of Mourning in Holocaust Texts
Moy McCrory: "This Time and Now": Identity and Belonging in the Irish Diaspora: The Irish in Britain and Second-Generational Silence
Literary Landscapes: Urbanism, Ecology and the Rural
Elsa Cavalié: "And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past": Recovering Identity in A Month in the Country
Monica Germanà: Beyond the Gaps: Postmodernist Representations of the Metropolis
Brian Jarvis: "It is always another world": Mapping the Global Imaginary in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
Alex Lockwood: The Shore is Not a Beach
Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell: Afterword: Lines of Flight: Unframing Land, Unframing Identity - Two Speculations
Index
