Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries (Spatial Practices, 11)

Too many landscapes have been reduced to silent commodities by being put into golden frames on top of our fireplaces. Too many landscapes have been reified by being considered as objects holding forth referents to an omnipotent looker-on, with his/her language ever ready to seize and transcribe. The articles gathered here, prolonging an international conference held at the University of Caen Basse-Normandie (France), 14-16 June 2007, set the landscapes loose again by engaging with their essentially relational quality.
What makes this volume particularly stimulating and critically innovative is this initial acknowledgement of a landscape’s reflectiveness – that is the fact that it contains unthought thought, and thus presents itself to us both passively and actively. This straightaway appraisal of the lines of flight in the seemingly static, tranquil images facing us, has opened the way to deeply critical readings bent on questioning old tracks, testing new itineraries, denying the closure of the subject. At the same time, and by way of consequence, it leads us to encounter the force in landscape. A force like an energy, an impetus, which makes it possible – if not advisable! – to still compose, read and enjoy landscapes in the XXIst century.

Pascale Guibert is a Senior Lecturer at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, where she teaches and researches both on the representations of landscape, especially in poetry – from the Romantic to the contemporary period –, and on reading theories. A few among her latest publications are: a chapter on Heaney’s Wordsworth contributing to a volume of essays on Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public/Private Divide in British Poetry since 1950, Adrian Grafe and Emily Merriman eds., MacFarland, 2010; and, with René Gallet, the edition of a volume on the manifold aspects taken by British Romanticism Copernician Revolution, Le Sujet romantique et le monde: la voie anglaise, Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2009.