This book introduces the beginning student to the major concepts, materials and tools of the discipline of geography. While it presents geographic theory, as whole and for each of its parts, the chief emphasis is on concrete analysis and example rather than on abstraction, an approach which has proven more successful for undergraduate courses than those with a more heavily theoretical bias. The text was extensively re-written for the third edition, which enhanced its clarity and effectiveness, with expanded cartographic coverage.

This book, first published in 1981, explores why it is that the modern built environment, while successfully providing material comfort and technical efficiency, none the less breeds despair and depression rather than inspires hope and commitment. The source of this paradox, where material benefits appear to have been gained only at the expense of intangible values and qualities is found in humanism, the persistent and powerful belief that all problems can be solved through the use of human reason. But humanism has become increasingly confused, rationalistic, callously devoted to efficiency, and authoritarian. These confusions and contradictions, together with the anti-nature stance of humanism and its failure to teach humane behaviour, lead the author to conclude that humanism is best rejected. Such rejection does not advocate the inhuman and anti-human, but requires instead a return to the ‘humility’ that lies at the origin of humanism – a respect for objects, creatures, environments and people. This ‘environmental humility’ is explored in the context of individuality of settings, ways of seeing landscapes, appropriation and ways of building places. This title will be of interest to students of human geography.

Humanistic geography now has an established position in the intellectual development of contemporary geography. However there has so far been little attempt to draw together the humanistic approach in one broad statement. This book by the leading figures in the field provides a platform for the exposition of humanistic geography in all its aspects.

For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography—what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called geosophy, a blending of geography and philosophy—to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. His latest book, Humanist Geography, is a testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer. In returning to and reappraising his previous books, Tuan emphasizes how the study of humanist geography can offer a younger generation of students, scholars, and teachers a path toward self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and even enlightenment. He argues that in the study of place can be found the wonders of the human mind and imagination, especially as understood by the senses, even as we human beings deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws.

Evocative descriptions of geographical places by novelists and poets are of great benefit both to students of literature and geography. They foster a deeper appreciation of the essences of and they frequently allow a sense of place to be felt more strongly by the reader. Geography and Literature is a uniquely interdisciplinary effort. The essays of distinguished creative writers, literary critics, and geographers, appraising literary places, demonstrate that literary landscapes are rooted in reality, and that the geographer's knowledge can help ground even highly symbolic literary landscapes in this reality. The book is divided into five sections, based on various approaches to landscape or place in literature. The domain is wide and includes such diverse areas as José Maria Arguedas's Peru, Turgenev's Russia, Bennett's Stoke-on-Trent, Cather's Nebraska, and Chrétien de Troyes's symbolic Arthurian landscapes. Contributors include César Caviedes, Jim Wayne Miller, Kenneth Mitchell, D. C. D. Pocock, Peter Preston, and Susan J. Rosowski. Students of geography and literature should find the collection useful. The avid student of human, social, cultural, and historical geography will become aware of factors exogamous to geography that stimulate appraisal and appreciation of place-and one of them is literary description. Similarly, the student of literature will gain an awareness of the actual or factual basis of a geographer's appraisal. Ultimately, it is hoped, such a collection can bridge the gap between the geographer's factual descriptions and the writer's flights of imagination, hence giving the world—both in geographical and literary terms—a more unified shape.

Annotation A fresh and far-ranging interpretation of the concept of place, this volume begins with a fundamental tension of our day: as communications technologies help create a truly global economy, the very political-economic processes that would seem to homogenize place actually increase the importance of individual localities, which are exposed to global flows of investment, population, goods, and pollution. Place, no less today than in the past, is fundamental to how the world works. The contributors to this volume -- distinguished scholars from geography, art history, philosophy, anthropology, and American and English literature -- investigate the ways in which place is embedded in everyday experience, its crucial role in the formation of group and individual identity, and its ability to reflect and reinforce power relations. Their essays draw from a wide array of methodologies and perspectives -- including feminism, ethnography, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and landscape ichnography -- to examine themes as diverse as morality and imagination, attention and absence, personal and group identity, social structure, home, nature, and cosmos.