Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The introduction commences with a ‘detour’ into the history of landscape art and the picturesque, suggesting ways that this mode pre-empted what may seem like more modern ideas about the interference between perception and representation. This discussion is folded into a brief account of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and the interventions of theorists including Doreen Massey and Marc Augé, establishing an immediate context for the work of Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair. Suggesting a twin heritage of the ‘English Journey’ on the one hand and the French Surrealists and Situationists on the other, the introduction then offers the tension between amant and amateur as a way of characterizing the balance of exotic/everyday, plan/coincidence, and high-brow/low-brow in these figures’ work. It considers the role of pedestrianism and melancholia before closing with a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Gustave Doré’s ‘New Zealander’.