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Author: Andrew McMurry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Through contemporary environmental philosophy and emerging paradigms in complex systems theory, Andrew McMurry presents a new reading of Emerson, Thoreau, and the green tradition in American thought. McMurry analyzes Emerson and Thoreau's foundational roles in the formation of the two main currents in American environmentalism: the managerial, or "shallow," and the radical, or "deep." The author draws, in particular, on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoesis and the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. These theories, says McMurry, give us the conceptual tools to update Emerson and Thoreau's philosophies of nature, literary aesthetics, and attitudes toward pastoralism for the current age of environmental risk and uncertainty. McMurry's systems approach helps us to recast essentialist, ultimately debilitating binaries such as nature/culture, wilderness/civilization, and wild/tame along the lines of a suppler, richer distinction: that between self-organizing systems (like language or society) and their environments (defined simply as whatever cannot communicate with the system). Such an undertaking also allows McMurry to reflect on the systemic obstacles that ecocriticism, as a genre enabling positive environmental practices, must confront if it is to be theoretically coherent. Sophisticated and socially relevant, Environmental Renaissance is both a call for critics to broaden their parameters and a warning about rhapsodizing on nature while our very life-support systems are crumbling.
Author: Andrew McMurry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Get Book
Book Description
Through contemporary environmental philosophy and emerging paradigms in complex systems theory, Andrew McMurry presents a new reading of Emerson, Thoreau, and the green tradition in American thought. McMurry analyzes Emerson and Thoreau's foundational roles in the formation of the two main currents in American environmentalism: the managerial, or "shallow," and the radical, or "deep." The author draws, in particular, on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoesis and the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. These theories, says McMurry, give us the conceptual tools to update Emerson and Thoreau's philosophies of nature, literary aesthetics, and attitudes toward pastoralism for the current age of environmental risk and uncertainty. McMurry's systems approach helps us to recast essentialist, ultimately debilitating binaries such as nature/culture, wilderness/civilization, and wild/tame along the lines of a suppler, richer distinction: that between self-organizing systems (like language or society) and their environments (defined simply as whatever cannot communicate with the system). Such an undertaking also allows McMurry to reflect on the systemic obstacles that ecocriticism, as a genre enabling positive environmental practices, must confront if it is to be theoretically coherent. Sophisticated and socially relevant, Environmental Renaissance is both a call for critics to broaden their parameters and a warning about rhapsodizing on nature while our very life-support systems are crumbling.
Author: Karl Appuhn
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801892619
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
The idea of a Venetian forestry service might strike one as the beginning of a joke. The statement that it began in the fourteenth century would surprise most people. Venice is built on a lagoon with no timber resources. This book reveals the story of Venice's attempt to establish protected forests in order to have a constant supply of wood. Beyond the need for wood for heating and cooking, tall beams of oak and beech were needed for ship building and the shoring up of breakwaters that kept the sea from flooding the city. The author follows the practice of forest conservation and management from its inception in the 1300s to the end of the eighteenth century. He details the administrative and legal debates as well as problems with the implementation of policies. This study is a corrective to histories that assume a lack of interest in forest conservation in Europe at this time. The experience of the Venetians also serves as an example for timber use and conservation today.
Author: Ken Hiltner
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
"This collection of essays takes a 'green' approach to representations of Eden while also considering the role of gender, politics, and poetics, discussing relevant issues of both literature and culture"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Andrea Kiss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429956835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
This volume investigates environmental and political crises that occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, and considers their effects on people’s lives. At this time, the fragile human existence was imagined as a ‘Dance of Death’, where anyone, regardless of social status or age, could perish unexpectedly. This book covers events ranging from cooling temperatures and the onset of the Little Ice Age, to the frequent occurrence of epidemic disease, pest infestations, food shortages and famines. Covering the mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries, this collection of essays considers a range of countries between Iceland (to the north), Italy (to the south), France (to the west) and the westernmost parts of Russia (to the east). This wide-reaching volume considers how deeply climate variability and changes affected and changed society in the late medieval to early modern period, and asks what factors, other than climate, interfered in the development of environmental stress and socio-economic crises. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Environmental and Climate History, Environmental Humanities, Medieval and Early Modern History and Historical Geography, as well as Climate Change and Environmental Sciences.
Author: Joel A. Tarr
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822972867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Every city has an environmental story, perhaps none so dramatic as Pittsburgh's. Founded in a river valley blessed with enormous resources-three strong waterways, abundant forests, rich seams of coal-the city experienced a century of exploitation and industrialization that degraded and obscured the natural environment to a horrific degree. Pittsburgh came to be known as “the Smoky City,” or, as James Parton famously declared in 1866, “hell with the lid taken off.” Then came the storied Renaissance in the years following World War II, when the city's public and private elites, abetted by technological advances, came together to improve the air and renew the built environment. Equally dramatic was the sweeping deindustrialization of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when the collapse of the steel industry brought down the smokestacks, leaving vast tracks of brownfields and riverfront. Today Pittsburgh faces unprecedented opportunities to reverse the environmental degradation of its history. In Devastation and Renewal, scholars of the urban environment post questions that both complicate and enrich this story. Working from deep archival research, they ask not only what happened to Pittsburgh's environment, but why. What forces-economic, political, and cultural-were at work? In exploring the disturbing history of pollution in Pittsburgh, they consider not only the sooty skies, but also the poisoned rivers and creeks, the mined hills, and scarred land. Who profited and who paid for such “progress”? How did the environment Pittsburghers live in come to be, and how it can be managed for the future? In a provocative concluding essay, Samuel P. Hays explores Pittsburgh's “environmental culture,” the attitudes and institutions that interpret a city's story and work to create change. Comparing Pittsburgh to other cities and regions, he exposes exaggerations of Pittsburgh's environmental achievement and challenges the community to make real progress for the future. A landmark contribution to the emerging field of urban environmental history, Devastation and Renewal will be important to all students of cities, of cultures, and of the natural world.
Author: Allen G. Debus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521293280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
An introduction to science and medicine during the earlier phrases of the scientific revolution.
Author: Todd Andrew Borlik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108247008
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Featuring over two hundred nature-themed texts spanning the disciplines of literature, science and history, this sourcebook offers an accessible field guide to the environment of Renaissance England, revealing a nation at a crossroads between its pastoral heritage and industrialized future. Carefully selected primary sources, each modernized and prefaced with an introduction, survey an encyclopaedic array of topographies, species, and topics: from astrology to zoology, bear-baiting to bee-keeping, coal-mining to tree-planting, fen-draining to sheep-whispering. The familiar voices of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marvell mingle with a diverse chorus of farmers, herbalists, shepherds, hunters, foresters, philosophers, sailors, sky-watchers, and duchesses - as well as ventriloquized beasts, trees, and rivers. Lavishly illustrated, the anthology is supported by a lucid introduction that outlines and intervenes in key debates in Renaissance ecocriticism, a reflective essay on ecocritical editing, a bibliography of further reading, and a timeline of environmental history and legislation drawing on extensive archival research.
Author: Bryan C. Keene
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606065467
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
Distant blue hills, soaring trees, vast cloudless skies—the majesty of nature has always had the power to lift the human spirit. For some it evokes a sense of timelessness and wonder. For others it reinforces religious convictions. And for many people today it raises concerns for the welfare of the planet. During the Renaissance, artists from Italy to Flanders and England to Germany depicted nature in their religious art to intensify the spiritual experience of the viewer. Devotional manuscripts for personal or communal use—from small-scale prayer books to massive choir books—were filled with some of the most illusionistic nature studies of this period. Sacred Landscapes, which accompanies an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, presents some of the most impressive examples of this art, gathering a wide range of illuminated manuscripts made between 1400 and 1600, as well as panel paintings, drawings, and decorative arts. Readers will see the influence of such masters as Albrecht Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, and Piero della Francesca and will gain new appreciation for manuscript illuminators like Simon Bening, Joris Hoefnagel, Vincent Raymond, and the Spitz Master. These artists were innovative in the early development of landscape painting and were revered throughout the early modern period. The authors provide thoughtful examination of works from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.
Author: Christopher P. Heuer
Publisher: Zone Books
ISBN: 1942130147
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination. European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet, as Christopher Heuer explains, between 1500 and 1700, one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North—a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination—offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “non-site,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts—and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy. In Into the White, Heuer uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates over perception and matter, representation, discovery, and the time of the earth—long before the nineteenth century Romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, he argues, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and impossible to be mastered, something beyond the idea of image itself.
Author: P. Outka
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230614493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often sharp division between European American and African American experiences of the natural world developed in American culture and history, and how those natural experiences, in turn, shaped the construction of race.
