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.

1. Introduction: Imaginative Literature and the Geographer Douglas C. D. Pocock 2. Of Truth of Clouds: John Ruskin and the Moral order in Landscape Denis Cosgrove and John E. Thornes 3. Literature and 'Reality': The Transformation of the Jutland Heath Kenneth Robert Olwig 4. Consiousness and the Novel: Fact or Fiction in the Wors of D. H. Lawrence Ian G. Cook 5. Newcomers, Existential Outsiders and Insiders: Their Portrayal in Two Books by Doris Lessing David Seamon 6. Roots and Rootlessness: An Exploration of the Concept in the Life and Novels of George Eliot Catherine A. Middleton 7. On Yearning for Home: An Epistemological View of Ontological Transformations Gunnar Olsson 8. Literature and the Fashioning of Tourist Taste Peter T. Newby 9. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as a Primer for an Exploration of Image and Place Howard F. Andrews 12. George Crabbe's Suffolk Scenes Hugh C. Prince 13. Shropshire: Reality and Symbol in the Work of May Webb John H. Paterson and Evangeline Paterson