Landscape and Power (2nd ed.)

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Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published April 2002, 384 pages, paper

ISBN 0226532054

The first edition of this book, published in 1994, reshaped the direction of landscape studies by considering landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of national and social identities. This second edition adds not only a new preface, but five new essays--from Edward Said, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jonathan Bordo, Michael Taussig, and Robert Pogue Harrison-extending the scope of the book in remarkable ways.

"[A]mbitious and handsomely illustrated. . . . [T]he contributors are less interested in how landscape is defined as an object or genre (a fixation of modernist art history), or in considering landscapes as texts to be decoded (a preoccupation of postmodernist art criticism), than in examining the way landscape 'works as a cultural practice'. . . . Anyone interested in the nature of visual representation and cultural constructions of nature should find this book intriguing."--Daniel Clayton, Canadian Geographer