Abstract

Abstract:This paper offers a short account of Prospect-Refuge theory, Jay Appleton's pioneering contribution to landscape aesthetics published as The Experience of Landscape in 1975. I discuss the theory's influence on a variety of writers, and introduce the photographic exhibition that Professor Appleton and I produced in the year before his death, featuring views of Britain that articulate his key principles. The paper ends with the suggestion that current phenomenological approaches in the Humanities give a new relevance to Appleton's work, which always stressed the significance of the imagination interpreting and recreating the world.