Hailed as a landmark in its field since its first publication in 1984, Denis E. Cosgrove's Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape has been influential well beyond geography. It has continued to spark lively debate among historians, geographers, art historians, social theorists, landscape architects, and others interested in the social and cultural politics of landscape.

Hailed as a landmark in its field since its first publication in 1984, Denis E. Cosgrove's Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape has been influential well beyond geography. It has continued to spark lively debate among historians, geographers, art historians, social theorists, landscape architects, and others interested in the social and cultural politics of landscape.

Artistic representations of landscape are studied widely in areas ranging from art history to geography to sociology. This book brings together more than fifty scholars from many disciplines to establish new ways of thinking about landscape in art.

This book, first published in 1988, draws together fourteen scholars from diverse disciplines to explicate the status of landscape as a cultural image.

Leading geographer Denis Cosgrove provides a series of personal reflections on the complex connections between seeing, imagining and representing the world geographically. In a series of eloquent essays he draws upon pictorial images - including maps, sketches, cartoons, paintings, and photographs - to explore and elaborate upon the many and varied ways in which the vast and varied earth, and at times the heavens beyond, have been both imagined and represented as a place of human habitation. The essays include reflections upon geographical discovery; urban cartography and utopian visions; ideas of landscape and the shaping of America; wilderness and masculinity; conceptions of the Pacific; and the imaginative grip of the Equator. Extensively illustrated, this engaging work reveals the richness of the geographical imagination as expressed over the past five centuries.

This book examines the power definiteness of landscape from a social constructivist perspective with a particular focus on the importance of aesthetic concepts of landscape in development. It seeks to answer the question of how societal notions of landscape emerge, how they are individually updated and how these ideas affect the use and design of physical space. It also analyzes how physical manifestations of societal activity impact on understandings of individual and societal landscapes and addresses the essential aspect of the social construction of landscape, cultural specificity, which in turn is discussed in the context of the expansion of a western landscape concept. The book offers an unprecedented, comprehensive and detailed examination of societal power relations in the context of landscape development. The numerous case studies from the physical manifestation of modern spatial planning in the United States, the power discourses concerning the design of model railway landscapes, and the medial production of stereotypical landscape notions shed light on the complex and multilayered interactions of collective and individual landscape references. It is a valuable resource for geographers, sociologists, landscape architects, landscape planners and philosophers.