Pastoral Cities

Pastoral Cities PDF Author: James L. Machor
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299112844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture's tendency to valorize nature and the rural world. Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of American thought and writing has been the widespread interest in collapsing that division. Convinced that the native landscape has offered special opportunities, Americans since the age of settlement have sought to build a harmonious urban-pastoral society combining the best of both worlds. Moreover, this goal has gone largely unchallenged in the culture except for the sophisticated responses in the writings of some of America's most eminent literary artists. Pastoral Cities explains the development of urban pastoralism from its origins in the prophetic vision of the New Jerusalem, applied to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through its secularization in the urban planning and reform of the 1800s. Machor critiques the sophisticated treatment of urban pastoralism by writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Wharton, and James by skillfully by combining cultural analysis with a close reading of urban plans, travel narratives, sermons, and popular novels. The product of this multifaceted approach is an analysis that works to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the pastoral ideal as cultural mythology.

Pastoral Cities

Pastoral Cities PDF Author: James L. Machor
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299112844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture's tendency to valorize nature and the rural world. Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of American thought and writing has been the widespread interest in collapsing that division. Convinced that the native landscape has offered special opportunities, Americans since the age of settlement have sought to build a harmonious urban-pastoral society combining the best of both worlds. Moreover, this goal has gone largely unchallenged in the culture except for the sophisticated responses in the writings of some of America's most eminent literary artists. Pastoral Cities explains the development of urban pastoralism from its origins in the prophetic vision of the New Jerusalem, applied to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through its secularization in the urban planning and reform of the 1800s. Machor critiques the sophisticated treatment of urban pastoralism by writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Wharton, and James by skillfully by combining cultural analysis with a close reading of urban plans, travel narratives, sermons, and popular novels. The product of this multifaceted approach is an analysis that works to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the pastoral ideal as cultural mythology.

Urban Pastoral

Urban Pastoral PDF Author: Timothy Gray
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299097
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
"We knew Koch, Guest, O'Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler thrived on the gritty, buoyant clank of city life, but that they drew from a secret fountain there only the Brill Building really let on, until now. In seven crisply argued, essayistic chapters, Gray lets us see and feel the invisible paradise glowing within the visible form of the subway, the skyscraper, the tenement bank, the tattoo parlor, a heaven ̀growing in the street/right up through the concrete, but soft and sweet and dreaming."---Kevin Killian, Author, Little Men --Book Jacket.

Wallless Cities

Wallless Cities PDF Author: Shen Hou
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819778271
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description


The China Environment Yearbook, Volume 4

The China Environment Yearbook, Volume 4 PDF Author: Dongping Yang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900419035X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
This volume of the China Environment Yearbook is the fourth in the seminal series by China’s first environmental NGOs, Friends of Nature. The fourth English translation updates readers on environmentally significant issues of 2008, a year of both tragedy and hope. 2008 was an eventful year that included such setbacks as the Sichuan Earthquake, debilitating snow and ice storms, an algae bloom at the site of the Olympic sailing venue prior to the games, and a worsening global economic crisis. But there were also events that filled the country with optimism, including a successful Beijing Olympic Games with good air quality, the upgrading of the State Environmental Protection Agency to ministerial level status, and significant developments in China’s environmental legal system and environmental public information disclosure mechanism. Other topics explored in this volume include marine pollution, wetlands, road ecology, eco-compensation, debates surrounding the newly instituted “plastic bag restriction” policy, public interest litigation, the concept of a low carbon economy, and the environmental performance of enterprises in 2008. Volume four is essential for those looking for a window into issues affecting China’s environment from the viewpoint of civil society.

The Environmental Imagination

The Environmental Imagination PDF Author: Lawrence Buell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674258624
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
With Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone, Buell offers an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more “ecocentric” way of being. In doing so, he provides a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.

Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region

Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region PDF Author: Mark Luccarelli
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9781572302280
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Well known for his column in The New Yorker, Lewis Mumford is widely regarded as the foremost urban critic of this century. Through historical and theoretical perspectives, author Mark Luccarelli traces the development of Mumford's thought on regional planning focusing on his pioneering concept of an ecologically-based region and shows how he attempted to turn his ideas into reality through the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). This informative book also demonstrates how Mumford's ideas remain extraordinarily relevant and valuable to today's urban problems.

Blake and the City

Blake and the City PDF Author: Jennifer Davis Michael
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Though usually classified as a Romantic, Blake subverts and dissolves the binaries on which Romanticism turns: self and other, art and nature, country and city. Rather than reject the city outright like many of his contemporaries, Blake embraces it as the intricate workshop of human imagination. Each chapter of this book focuses on a specific text of Blake's that illustrates a particular conception of metaphorical embodiment of the city. These shifting metaphors emphasize the construction of all human environments and the need for imaginative labor to build and interpret them. This study seeks to bridge a gap between transcendent and historicist readings of Blake while at the same time challenging assumptions that still color our view of the city in the twenty-first century. Jennifer Davis Michael is Associate Professor of English at the University of the South.

Writing the City

Writing the City PDF Author: Peter Preston
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134843682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Arguing that classic geographical descriptions of the city fail to accomodate the crucial aspect of human life, this visualizes the city through the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pains of international novelists and creative writers.

Interpreting Environments

Interpreting Environments PDF Author: Robert Mugerauer
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292754981
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography. Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to recover the meaning of Jung's and Wittgenstein's houses by analyzing their historical, intentional contexts. The second case study utilizes deconstruction to explore Egyptian, French neoclassical, and postmodern attempts to use pyramids to constitute a sense of lasting presence. And the third case study employs hermeneutics to reveal how the American understanding of the natural landscape has evolved from religious to secular to ecological since the nineteenth century.

Modernism and the Spirit of the City

Modernism and the Spirit of the City PDF Author: Iain Boyd Whyte
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415258401
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This selection of groundbreaking essays offers a significant and long overdue reassessment of the aims and intentions of European architecture and urbanism over the period 1880-1960.