Becoming Human in the Land: An Introduction to the Special Issue of Heritage: Landscapes

Authors

Drew HubbellFollow

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue of Landscapes theorizes the questions suggested by the theme, "Landscape: Heritage." Weaving personal narrative with literary criticism, cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, the essay examines the way humans become human by developing complex relationships with landscapes over time. As landscapes contain the physical traces of human habitation and development, certain narratives of human inhabitants are written and memorialized in and by those landscapes. The monumentalization of specific heritages leads to contests between human groups who require certain heritages to be memorialized, but not others. Greater awareness of one's humanity requires recovery of polyphonic landscape heritages and continual re-inscription. The concluding section of the essay traces the connections between the individual publications in the issue, and shows how they unite in providing diverse understandings of how humans become human by re-inscribing heritage in Landscapes.

Author Biography

Drew Hubbell is Associate Professor of Nineteenth Century British Literature at Susquehanna University, USA and Research Professor at University of Western Australia, AU. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University, AU, while on a year's sabbatical studying the literary influences on sustainable environmental movements.

From 2009-2015, he was Head of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, and in 2016, Academic Dean at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.

His recent books include Byron's Nature: A Romantic Theory of Cultural Ecology (Palgrave, 2018) and The Story of Transition Towns in Western Australia (with Kayt Davies; Landscapes Press, 2018). His essay, "Byron's Ecotone Poetics," is forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism.

Recommended Citation

Hubbell, D. (2018). Becoming Human in the Land: An Introduction to the Special Issue of Heritage: Landscapes. Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, 8(1).
Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol8/iss1/3