The past decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors and concepts of geography now permeate literature, philosophy and the arts. Concepts such as space, place, landscape, mapping and territory have become pervasive as conceptual frameworks and core metaphors in recent publications by humanities scholars and well-known writers.
Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds contains over twenty-five contributions from leading scholars who have engaged this vital intellectual project from various perspectives, both inside and outside of the field of geography. The book is divided into four sections representing different modes of examining the depth and complexity of human meaning invested in maps, attached to landscapes, and embedded in the spaces and places of modern life. The topics covered range widely and include interpretations of space, place, and landscape in literature and the visual arts, philosophical reflections on geographical knowledge, cultural imagination in scientific exploration and travel accounts, and expanded geographical understanding through digital and participatory methodologies. The clashing and blending of cultures caused by globalization and the new technologies that profoundly alter human environmental experience suggest new geographical narratives and representations that are explored here by a multidisciplinary group of authors.
This book is essential reading for students, scholars, and interested general readers seeking to understand the new synergies and creative interplay emerging from this broad intellectual engagement with meaning and geographic experience.
Part 1: Mapping 1. Why America is Called America 2. Above the Dead Cities 3. Digital Cartographies and Medieval Geographies 4. Mapping the Taboo 5. 'Choros, Chora' and the Question of Landscape 6. Thematic Cartography and the Study of American History Part 2: Reflecting 7. Do Places Have Edges? A Geo-Philosophical Inquiry 8. Race, Mobility and the Humanities: A Geosophical Approach 9. The World in Plain View 10. Courtly Geography: Nature, Authority and Civility in Early Eighteenth Century France 11. Darwinian Landscapes 12. Travel and the Domination of Space in the European Imagination 13. The Good Inherit the Earth Part 3: Representing 14. Putting Pablo Neruda's 'Alturas de Machu Picchu' In Its Places 15. Great Balls of Fire: Envisioning the Brilliant Meteor of 1783 16. Reading Landscapes and Telling Stories: Geography, the Humanities and Environmental History 17. Participatory Historical Geography? Shaping and Failing to Shape Social Memory at an Oklahoma Monument 18. Still-Life, After-Life 'Nature Morte': W.G. Sebald and the Demands of Landscape 19. The Texture of Space: Desire and Displacement in Hiroshi Teshigahara's 'Woman of the Dunes' 20. Restoration: Synoptic Reflections 21. Overlapping Ambiguities, Disciplinary Perspectives and Metaphors of Looking: Reflections on a Landscape Photograph Part 4: Performing 22. Inverting Perspective: Icons' Performative Geographies 23. Literary Geography: The Novel as a Spatial Event 24. Materialising Vision: Performing a High-Rise View 25. Technician of Light: Patrick Geddes and the Optic of Geography 26. Deserted Places, Remote Voices: Performing Landscape 27. Photography and Its Circulations 28. Beyond the Power of Art to Represent?: Narratives and Performances of the Arctic in the 1630s 29. Navigating the Northwest Passage
