This panel seeks to arrange a comparative conversation about the relationship between genre and landscape from the twentieth century to present. However they are to be understood, genres are highly portable and long have been refashioned across linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries. Landscapes, however, appear in most critical accounts as deeply located. Whether in the spatial turn, for regionalist writers and filmmakers, or in more recent environmental media and ecocritical paradigms, landscapes can be remade and destroyed, connected or isolated, are (as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us) techniques of power or components of identity—but remain intractably somewhere. To think about genre in a particular landscape is to ask fundamental questions about the mediation of experience by place.

As a scene of reading or as setting, how does landscape condition or delimit genre? How do familiar questions of commensurability, of genre’s adaptation or remaking in new contexts, rely on or presuppose similarities between landscapes as integral to basic subsistence and cultural life? As thrown into relief by genre, in what ways does landscape sustain or exceed the ways of world-making (whether as a world-system, the stages of a supply chain, national borders, or geography)? And what does reading for landscape reveal about the history of the many portable genres of globalization?

Beyond thinking across a broad range of linguistic contexts, we are particularly interested in works from or within landscapes, such as the rural, semi-rural, ocean, pastoral, or any number of biome and water table demarcated regional places. This helps to problematize or move beyond the urban-centered assessment of genre under globalization, which too easily elides many places in the world into a structural position or zone in a world-system, usually through the avatar of their regional centers. We do not discount or ignore the urban, but seek to reframe it within the broader landscape which supports it and which is often mobilized as setting, set, or regional identity on the pages and screens of urban life. To begin with the landscape is to emphasize a history of globalization as seen from the rural and the provincial. To think genre from landscape is also an invitation to consider how the natural world is at work in these histories of aesthetic conventions and changes as much as it is an invitation to examine how it has remained uninterrogated. 

We hope to entertain some of the following or related questions:

• Class, nation, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality: what do we need to consider to understand the relationship between genre and landscape? Seascape?
• (How) does genre help us distinguish landscape from a cluster of related terms like environment, place, location, or territory? How do these distinctions shift with region, history, etc.?
• (How) do these questions change between literature and film?
• What new cross-landscape histories might emerge from such an approach?