Once upon a time geographers had little room for narrative. To be sure many wrote narratives, unselfconsciously, to describe processes of change, but few reflected on, or analysed, the nature and value of narrative as a form of exposition or interpretation. When they did so, in mid-20th century Anglophone geography, narrative appeared a problem in positioning geography as a discipline, both too powerful a method and too powerless. As a conventional mode of history, narrative appeared to over-ride spatial or visual frameworks of interpretation, which led H. C. Darby to identify some interesting experiments in geographical description, cross-sections, mixtures of past and present tense, 'retrospective asides' and 'flash-backs'. 1 Endorsing positivist views of causality, David Harvey found narrative a weak method for geography, at best a preliminary verbal sketch to be filled out through more powerful, quantitative models of temporal explanation. 2 If we plot human geography's story as a paradigm shift into a post-positivist period from the late 1970s, those who made room for narrative did so from a variety of positions, humanist, realist, marxist, post-modernist, and the many combinations thereof. 3 Most familiarized themselves with a wider, inter-disciplinary narratological turn in the arts and social sciences, coming from literary criticism, cultural anthropology, and particularly a widely influential hermeneutic and historiographical strain in philosophy, notably in canonical works by Paul Ricouer, Hayden White and Louis Mink. While narratology addressed a radical, structuralist suspicion of narrative, its rhetorical power to offer a mystifyingly false coherence and closure to events, it also sought to redeem narrative as a theoretically powerful and complicated form of explanation, a precise cognitive instrument, taking many forms, genres, tropes, tenses, including various kinds of storytelling. 4 Moreover narrative not only focussed on understanding the past, but also framed the present and future, a relay of retrospect and prospect. The model of explanation itself was widened to include various modes of cultural interpretation, understanding and description, contextual, creative modes of making and meaning displacing naturalistic modes of causality. The sequential passing of time was configured synoptically, even spatially, such that period and place were brought into closer conceptual conjunction, the plot, and emplotment, as a matter of both locating and telling, of creating situated stories.The recuperation of narrative in human geography was upheld as a way of connecting, or reconnecting, conceptual polarities such as idiographic/nomothetic, analysis/synthesis and agency/ structure, and connecting other polarities which had seldom hitherto been recognized as a
As a cultural period the 1960s is produced through overlapping forms of social memory in which private and public recollections overlap. In both sound and imagery, pop music, particularly that of the Beatles, is a principal medium of memory for the period. For the period from 1965, the progressive aspects of pop music, particularly in sonic and lyrical complexity, expressed a retrospective, pastoral strain that was itself a form of memory of other periods and places, of childhood and country life. The Beatles double-A-sided single Strawberry Fields forever/Penny Lane, released in February 1967, epitomizes these complexities in a suburban version of pastoral, recalling the Liverpool childhoods of songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney. An analysis of the production and reception of the record, including lyrical genesis and musical development, publicity imagery, reviews in both the popular music papers and national news press, and the impact of the record in Liverpool and London, identifies the importance of intense, immediate moments in cultural geography, and their connection to longer developments in a theatre of memory that plays comedy and history as well as tragedy
Georgian landscaping is conventionally studied as an example of high culture, in terms of the history of art, literature and aesthetics. We take a more down to earth view and look at landscaping as an example of estate management, in terms of such topics as farming, planting, leases and rents. We do not pretend that the study of estate management offers a sort of ground-truth for understanding landscaping. Terms like ‘rent’ and ‘estate’ are of course no more eternal, nor less ideological, than terms like ‘picturesque’ and ‘landscape’. We will not neglect high culture, indeed a central theme of the paper is how the aesthetics of painting helped frame estate management. Even a casual reading of the literature on ‘improvement’ in the eighteenth century reveals a complex overlapping of not just economic and aesthetic issues but moral and political ones too. And the point of this paper is to reinsert landscaping and estate management into this complex.
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