Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic

[Dave Monroe]

Olwig, Kenneth.  Landscape, Nature, and the Body
   Politic from Britain's Renaissance to America's
   New World.  Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002.

Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the
origins and lasting influences of two contesting but
intertwined discourses that persist today when we use
the words landscape, country, scenery, nature,
national. In the first sense, the land is a physical
and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation
state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain
majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining
sea). In the second, the country is constituted
through its people and established through time and
precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of
the Pilgrims' pride). Kenneth Olwig's extended
exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of
scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new
avenues of thinking in the areas of geography,
literature, theater, history, political science, law,
and environmental studies.

Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American
history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts
between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament,
and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England
and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He
uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with
stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone
for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands
from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal.
Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body
politic from Europe to America and to global politics,
illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and
environmental planning to theories of polity and
virulent nationalistic movements.

"A highly original and brilliantly argued case for the
power of landscape. Olwig shows how the concept of
landscape has historically affected theater,
literature, art, nation building, law, racism, nature
conservation, and wilderness movements."—Robert David
Sack, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Kenneth Olwig is professor of geography at the
University of Trondheim in Norway and the author of
Nature's Ideological Landscape.

http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/3489.htm

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