The Geography Of The Imagination

In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation by bringing together a range of voices from history of science, historical geography, and environmental history, each speaking to a set of questions about the role of space and place in the production, circulation, reception, and application of knowledges about weather and climate. The volume develops the concept of “geographical imagination” to address the intersecting forces of scientific knowledge, cultural politics, bodily experience, and spatial imaginaries, which shape the history of knowledges about climate.

Schulten examines four enduring institutions of learning that produced some of the most influential sources of geographic knowledge in modern history: maps and atlases, the National Geographic Society, the American university, and public schools."--BOOK JACKET.

The advent of photography opened up new worlds to 19th century viewers, who were able to visualize themselves and the world beyond in unprecedented detail. But the emphasis on the photography's objectivity masked the subjectivity inherent in deciding what to record, from what angle and when. This text examines this inherent subjectivity. Drawing on photographs that come from personal albums, corporate archives, commercial photographers, government reports and which were produced as art, as record, as data, the work shows how the photography shaped and was shaped by geographical concerns.

This book is a study of the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought around 1800.

This book examines intellectual curiosity as the driving force in scholarly endeavor on the borderlands of geography, history, anthropology, and other disciplines. The premise is that curiosity is a salient trait of certain people past and present and that each field has its exemplars in this regard. For Carl O. Sauer (1889-1975), America's leading geographer of the twentieth century, and his intellectual descendants, the inquisitive spirit stood high on the list of indispensable scholarly attributes. Their curiosity-driven studies converging space, time, ecology, and culture involved a fluid and unpredictable process of intellectual discovery. This book, combining the empirical with the philosophical and reflexive, describes how the power of intrinsic motivation and the thread of a romantic consciousness blend with the joy of polymathic exploration.

Geographical imagination and the authority of images collects three papers and an interview on the themes presented and discussed during the 2005 Hettner lectures. Cosgrove examines the roles that vision and imagination have played in shaping material and represented landscapes at scales ranging from the local and regional to the global and cosmic. The book presents substantive studies of cosmographic and global mapping, the picturesque tradition and suburban Los Angeles, and the use of aeTranspennine' England as a geographical art gallery. Embedded in these are theoretical and ethical reflections on the ways that we come to know the world, ourselves and each other through geographical engagements, especially when these are mediated through graphic images. The interview locates these themes within the context of Denis Cosgrove's development as a geographer and his response to debates within the discipline about the roles of imagination, culture and representation within geographies's humanities tradition. Contents Peter Meusburger / Hans Gebhardt: Introduction: Hettner-Lecture 2005 in Heidelberg Denis Cosgrove: Apollo's eye: a cultural geography of the globe Denis Cosgrove: Landscape, culture and modernity Denis Cosgrove: Regional art: Transpennine geography remembered and exhibited Tim Freytag / Heike Joens: Vision and the, culturalae in geography: a biographical interview with Denis Cosgrove The Klaus Tschira Foundations gGmbH u Photographic representations: Hettner-Lecture 2005 u List of participants.

Twelve literary scholars and historians investigate the ways in which space and place are politically, religiously, and culturally inflected. Exploring medieval texts as diverse as Icelandic sagas, Ptolemy's Geography, and Mandeville's Travels, the contributors illustrate the intimate connection between geographical conceptions and the mastery of land, the assertion of doctrine, and the performance of sexuality.