FIELDS OF VISION: LANDSCAPE IMAGERY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES

Scully’s The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. Although a vital and impressive analysis, additional references bolstered and amplified his arguments. In Chapter 4 only four sources are cited, with more than half of the footnoted citations drawn from one source. Again, the limited number of sources suggests a circumscribed viewpoint for the multifaceted questions under discussion. This situation may, of course, be the result of the abbreviated length of the book. Nature Pictorialized attempts to do too much in too little space by tracing the conceptual and stylistic evolution of the relationship between pictorial works and real landscapes, while offering a critical review of contemporary landscape architecture. Such topics might effectively be dealt with in a pithy essay, without addressing supplemental issues. However, in this book-length treatment, efforts at consolidation resulted in important arguments being truncated and points not central to the main thesis being eliminated. In Nature Pictorialized, the author clearly distinguishes the difference between the naturalistic and the natural in paintings. She does not even allude to the extensive 19th century literature in which this same distinction in American landscape architecture is widely acknowledged, suggesting instead that designers really believed they were "creating nature" in their works. The complexity and importance of the issue raised by Crandell necessitates a more lengthy discussion than provided in either the summarizing essay, which serves as an introduction to the book, or in the chapters that present evidence to support the author’s conclusion. It is always difficult to determine the appropriate length for one’s arguments. Surely every author wishes to write a longer book, while every publisher wants it to be more concise. In the case of issues as multifarious and oblique as those in Nature Pictorialized, there are always questions, tangential to the author’s principal aims, that must be addressed at least in a cursory way for the reader to discern the depth of understanding that has, of necessity, been summarized in the volume published. Nancy.]. Volkman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A &M University, College Station, Texas.