Landscapes of the Song of Songs

Landscapes of the Song of Songs is a unique, interdisciplinary approach to the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs. It develops a theoretical concept of landscape to explore the Song’s intrinsic interest in the natural world, engaging with work from the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature. It emphasizes the made quality of both landscapes and poetry, which are art forms defined by human intervention and vision. In this way it critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy in the Song between “nature” and “culture.” Each chapter explores a different imaginational landscape of the Song, using insights from landscape theory to inform close readings of the Song’s poems. The landscape concept emphasizes the material landscape, which is the primary focus of the study of agriculture in the Song. The landscape concept also maintains an insistence on human intervention, which informs the studies of both the garden and the city. Finally, a landscape concept implies an awareness of the viewer, which helps to re-appreciate the descriptive poems as a process of perceiving the lover and the land. With a twofold emphasis on landscape and lyric, this book shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, enfolded in complex relationships of fragility and care. In addition, Landscapes offers new, close readings of selected poems of the Song.