Author: Tricia Cusack
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 081565068X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Painted riverscapes such as Claude Monet’s impressions of the Seine, Isaak Levitan’s Volga views, or Thomas Cole’s Hudson scenery became iconic not least because they embodied nationalist ideas about place and about culture. At a time when nationalism was taking root across Europe and the United States, the riverscape played an important role in transforming the abstract idea of the nation into a potent visual image. It not only offered a picture of the nation’s physical character, but through aspects such as style, the figures portrayed, and the nature of the implied spectator, it presented a cultural ideal. In this highly original book, Tricia Cusak explores significance of painted riverscapes to the creation of national identities in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and America. Focusing on five rivers, the Hudson, the Volga, the Seine, the Thames, and the Shannon, the author outlines the history of the development of national landscapes, elaborating on the distinctive nature of riverscapes. Drawing on the symbolic potential of rivers to represent life and time, the riverscape provided a metaphor for the mythic stream of national history flowing unimpeded out of the past and into the future.
Author: Tricia Cusack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351575732
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
The water's edge, whether shore or riverbank, is a marginal territory that becomes invested with layers of meaning. The essays in this collection present intriguing perspectives on how the water's edge has been imagined and represented in different places at various times and how this process contributed to the formation of social identities. Art and Identity at the Water's Edge focuses upon national coastlines and maritime heritage; on rivers and seashore as regions of liminality and sites of conflicting identities; and on the edge as a tourist setting. Such themes are related to diverse forms of art, including painting, architecture, maps, photography, and film. Topics range from the South African seaside resort of Durban to the French Riviera. The essays explore successive ideological mappings of the Jordan River, and how Czech cubist architecture and painting shaped a new nationalist reading of the Vltava riverbanks. They examine post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans as a filmic spectacle that questions assumptions about American identity, and the coast depicted as a site of patriotism in nineteenth-century British painting. The collection demonstrates how waterside structures such as maritime museums and lighthouses, and visual images of the water's edge, have contributed to the construction of cultural and national identities.
Author: Paul Readman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108575811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
People have always attached meaning to the landscape that surrounds them. In Storied Ground Paul Readman uncovers why landscape matters so much to the English people, exploring its particular importance in shaping English national identity amid the transformations of modernity. The book takes us from the fells of the Lake District to the uplands of Northumberland; from the streetscapes of industrial Manchester to the heart of London. This panoramic journey reveals the significance, not only of the physical characteristics of landscapes, but also of the sense of the past, collective memories and cultural traditions that give these places their meaning. Between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, Englishness extended far beyond the pastoral idyll of chocolate-box thatched cottages, waving fields of corn and quaint country churches. It was found in diverse locations - urban as well as rural, north as well as south - and it took strikingly diverse forms.
Author: Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782384324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Rivers figure prominently in a nation’s historical memory, and the Volga and Mississippi have special importance in Russian and American cultures. Beginning in the pre-modern world, both rivers served as critical trade routes connecting cultures in an extensive exchange network, while also sustaining populations through their surrounding wetlands and bottomlands. In modern times, “Mother Volga” and the “Father of Waters” became integral parts of national identity, contributing to a sense of Russian and American exceptionalism. Furthermore, both rivers were drafted into service as the means to modernize the nation-state through hydropower and navigation. Despite being forced into submission for modern-day hydrological regimes, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers persist in the collective memory and continue to offer solace, recreation, and sustenance. Through their histories we derive a more nuanced view of human interaction with the environment, which adds another lens to our understanding of the past.
Author: Lia Nicole Brozgal
Publisher:
ISBN: 1789622387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Absent the Archive is the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. This corpus, or anarchive, includes a variety of cultural texts whose formal, diegetic, and discursive strategies represent the massacre and its erasure, its "becoming invisible," and its afterlives as a trace, a memory, a sign.
Author: Joanne Garde-Hansen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1788317769
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
As flooding, drought and water scarcity become more pronounced due to climate change, so the way in which these events are presented in the media assumes greater significance. In particular, the media plays an important role in shaping the public perception and understanding of water issues, and debates around extreme weather events more generally. Joanne Garde-Hansen's book offers a sustained and comprehensive exploration of media representations of water. Drawing on a wide range of media – including newspapers, digital, photography, radio, television and video, as well as empirical research on media and memory – she examines how drought, flooding and water management have been portrayed in the media, both historically and in the contemporary world. The use of the media by water institutions to manage public perceptions and the use of digital media by the public to engage with water companies is also included. A particular feature of the book is an examination of water and gender in developed nations. One of the first books to look at media representations of water, this pioneering work provides valuable insights for both scholarly and professional water research.
Author: Pamela Odih
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443870358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
The neoliberal environmental governance of river conservation, coupled with the organizational modernization imposed and sustained by the European Union's water directives, engenders Other Spaces of feminist ecological alignment. The riparian landscapes of urban cities are manifestations of political and ideological rationalities operating under the constraints of capitalist markets, and are saturated by the contradictions of neoliberal environmental science. Neoliberal rationalities configur...
Author: Peter Coates
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178023144X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Many of the world’s major cities sprang up on the banks of rivers. Used for water, food, irrigation, transportation, and power, rivers sustain life and connect the world together, but most of us think of them simply as waterways that must be crossed on the way to another place. Using four European and two North American rivers as examples, A Story of Six Rivers considers the place of rivers in our world and emphasizes the inextricable links between history, culture, and ecology. Peter Coates explores six rivers, chosen as examples of the types of rivers found on the planet: the Danube, the second-longest river in Europe; the Spree, which flows through Berlin; the Po, which cuts eastward across northern Italy; the Mersey in northwest England; the Yukon, which runs through Canada and Alaska; and the Los Angeles in California. Creating a series of river biographies, Coates gives voice to each of these bodies of water, exploring how rivers nurture us, provide cultural and economic opportunities, and pose threats to our everyday lives. He challenges recent narratives that paint rivers as the victims of abuse, pollution, and damage at the hands of humans, focusing on change rather than devastation. Describing how humans and rivers form a symbiotic—and sometimes mutually destructive—relationship, Coates argues that rivers illustrate the limits of human authority and that their capacity to inspire us is as strong as our ability to pollute them. An intimate portrait of the way these bodies of water inform our lives, A Story of Six Rivers will make us reconsider the streams and tributaries we traverse each day.
Author: Ali Mozaffari
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134784163
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Pasargadae is the location of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Through the ages it was Islamised and the tomb was ascribed to the Mother of Solomon. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that archaeological evidence demonstrated the relationship between the site and Cyrus and it was appropriated into conflicting political discourses on nationalism and Islamism while concurrently acknowledged as a national and then a World Heritages site. However, Pasargadae is neither an isolated World Heritage site, nor purely a symbol of abstract state politics. Pasargadae and its immediate vicinity constitute a living landscape occupied by villagers, nomads and tourists. This edited volume presents for the first time a broad, multi-disciplinary examination of Pasargadae by experts from both outside and within Iran. It specifically focuses on those disciplines that are absent from existing studies, such as ethnography, tourism and museum studies providing valuable insights into this fascinating place. In its totality, the book argues that to understand World Heritage sites and their problems fully, a holistic approach should be adopted, which considers the manifold of perspectives and issues. It also puts forward a novel approach to the question of heritage, representation and construction of collective identity from the framework of place.
Author: Margaret Ziolkowski
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 164453195X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Rivers in Russian Literature focuses on the Russian literary and folkloric treatment of five rivers—the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. Each chapter traces, within a geographical and historical context, the evolution of the literary representation of one river. Imagination may endow a river with aesthetic or spiritual qualities; ethnic, national, or racial associations; or commercial or agricultural symbolism of many kinds. Russian literary responses to these five rivers have much to tell us about the society that produced them as well as the rivers they treat. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS
