What Is Landscape?
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape.
“Mr. Stilgoe does not ask that we take his book outdoors with us; he believes that reading and experiencing landscapes are activities that should be kept separate. But, as I learned in his book, the hollow storage area in a car driver's door was once a holster, the 'secure nesting place of a pistol.' I recommend you stow your copy there.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape's essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. (“What is that?” “Well, it's not really a slough, not really, it's a bayou...”) He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries.
What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills—icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.
Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise—to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Landscape professor Stilgoe (Old Fields) compiles a thoughtful collection of historical anecdotes, ruminations, and common and abstruse terms concerning his specialty. For his purposes, he defines landscape as a word "naming the skeleton and sinews of shaped land" and as a subject best studied through a process of careful, reflective observation one involving frequent recourse to a dictionary. Part vocabulary list and part conversational lecture, Stilgoe's frequently digressive verbal ramble through the enduring evidence of human efforts to tame and occupy open spaces leads most often to language, etymology, and history. Once he finishes a long initial meditation on landscape as an act of perception, imagination, and linguistic evolution, Stilgoe moves onto a historically grounded assessment of such features as homes, farms, roads, and fields, yielding a rich and entertaining understanding of how centuries-old practices of land use are embedded in terminology still used today. Aimed at an audience with the leisure to take long walks and the means of accessing the countryside, Stilgoe's book champions landscape studies as a discipline founded on curiosity and deep, associative thought, open to byways, discovery, and the occasional absurdity, rewarding for amateurs and seasoned practitioners alike.
