Mapping the Invisible Landscape by Kent C Ryden

Mapping the Invisible Landscape by Kent C Ryden

Any landscape has an unseen component: a subjective component of experience, memory, and narrative which people familiar with the place understand to be an integral part of its geography but which outsiders may not suspect the existence of—unless they listen and read carefully. This invisible landscape is make visible though stories, and these stories are the focus of this engrossing book. Traveling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden—himself a most careful listener and reader—asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings? Our sense of any place, he argues, consists of a deeply ingrained experiential knowledge of its physical makeup; an awareness of its communal and personal history; a sense of our identity as being inextricably bound up with its events and ways of life; and an emotional reaction, positive or negative, to its meanings and memories. Ryden demonstrates that both folk and literary narratives about place bear a striking thematic and stylistic resemblance. Accordingly, Mapping the Invisible Landscape examines both kinds of narratives. For his oral materials, Ryden provides an in-depth analysis of narratives collected in the Coeur d'Alene mining district in the Idaho panhandle; for his consideration of written works, he explores the “essay of place,” the personal essay which takes as its subject a particular place and a writer's relationship to that place. Drawing on methods and materials from geography, folklore, and literature, Mapping the Invisible Landscape offers a broadly interdisciplinary analysis of the way we situate ourselves imaginatively in the landscape, the way we inscribe its surface with stories. Written in an extremely engaging style, this book will lead its readers to an awareness of the vital role that a sense of place plays in the formation of local cultures, to an understanding of the many-layered ways in which place interacts with individual lives, and to renewed appreciation of the places in their own lives and landscapes.

Kent Ryden teaches in the American and New England studies program at the University of Southern Maine. He received the American Studies Association's Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for his dissertation, a revised version of which became his first book, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (Iowa, 1993); he is also the author of Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New England (Iowa, 2001).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780877454144
ISBN 10	0877454140
Title	Mapping the Invisible Landscape
Author	Kent C Ryden
Series	American Land And Life Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Iowa Press
Year published	1993-06-30
Number of pages	326
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.