Author: Peter Conrad
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040253040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
In his book Imagining America (originally published in 1980), Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope, Americans are unkempt brutes, throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells, they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gospel of art; D. H. Lawrence wants to rescue them by fomenting revolution in their stale, sterile society. For W. H. Auden, Americans are an existential people, sad citizens of a deracinated modern world, suffering from anxiety; for Chrsitopher Isherwood, they are bland, sun-tanned Oriental angels. But there is a logic to the succession of these images, which Peter Conrads’s narrative follows. The Victorians are disturbed by America because it is not yet a society and lacks the upholstery of manners. Their modern successors, however, praise it for this very disability and find there a psychological, mystical or even psychedelic freedom denied to them by the Europe they have left behind. Imagining America is stimulating both as cultural history and literary criticism. Superbly written, it presents an argumentative tour de force in a style that is witty and diverting.
Author: Patrick McGreevy
Publisher: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Niagara Falls was a lightning rod for nineteenth-century enthusiasms. Although travelers came to the falls to experience a place they considered outside the world of their ordinary lives, they brought with them their contemporary concerns. Many tourists were obsessed with the mysteries of death, others with scientific or religious speculation. The way they imagined Niagara Falls found expression in a torrent of writings and images that took a variety of forms. Patrick McGreevy begins with the question, What can these visions of Niagara tell us about the place itself? The landscape surrounding the falls contains not only parks and religious shrines but also circuses, horror museums, and factories. People travel to Niagara not only to experience nature but also to celebrate marriages or commit suicide. One way to make sense of these bizarre "human accumulations", as H. G. Wells called them, is to take seriously the Niagaras people have imagined. This book focuses on four interlocking themes that recur time and again in descriptions of the falls: Niagara as a thing imagined from afar, as a metaphor for death, as an embodiment of nature, and as a focus of future events. Using the skills of a cultural geographer, McGreevy discovers some surprising connections between the Niagara people have imagined and the one they made, between its natural grandeur and its industrial exploitation, between Frederick Law Olmsted's Reservation and the Love Canal.
Author: Ernest Sternberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1567509444
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Though many still think that we live in an information economy, Ernest Sternberg asserts that the driving force in 21st-century capitalism is not information, but image. Through studies of food processing, real estate development, tourism, movies, and labor performances, he examines how businesses endow products with evocative meaning. It has become common wisdom that we live in a postindustrial information society in which data and calculation underlie wealth. But now that information is as routinely produced as industrial or agricultural goods, businesses are discovering that they best achieve competitive advantage by producing what consumers most dearly seek—personal meaning. The 21st-century economy produces just that: not merely information, but evocative images; not just commodities, but meaning-laden icons. As Sternberg shows, foods now appeal through their sensuality and nostalgia; houses and stores draw customers through their exoticism; people sell their labor through the deliberate performance of the self for the market; and tourist destinations offer up carefully crafted thematic experiences. Whereas farms, factories, and information processors once stood at the core of the economy, now movie studios do, producing the product valued above all, meaningful content, from which downstream firms acquire the themes that animate desire. Now that meaning pervades production, Sternberg argues, modes of inquiry once reserved for the humanities make sense in the study of the economy. Drawing on art history and aesthetics, he introduces iconography as a mode of cultural analysis adapted to the study of commercial production. Through comparative studies of diverse economic sectors, ranging from food processing to tourism, Sternberg carries out an iconographic analysis of the new economy. This is a provocative study for scholars, students, and professionals dealing with marketing and consumer research, culture and media studies, socio-economics, and economic geography.
Author: James D. McNiven
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
ISBN: 1627871411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 579
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Book Description
Author: Daniel Macfarlane
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774864257
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing façade designed to appeal to tourists. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America. Daniel Macfarlane details how engineers, bureaucrats, and politicians conspired to manipulate the world’s most famous waterfall. Essentially, they turned this natural wonder into a tap: huge tunnels divert the waters of the Niagara River around the Falls, which ebb and flow according to the tourism calendar. To hide the visual impact of diverting the majority of the water, the United States and Canada cooperated to install massive control works while reshaping and shrinking the Horseshoe Falls. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on how the Niagara landscape ultimately embodies both the power of technology and the power of nature.
Author: Daniel MacFarlane
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774826452
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
A megaproject half a century in the making, the planning and building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project is one of the defining episodes in North American history. Possibly the largest construction undertaking in Canadian history, and one of the most ambitious borderlands projects ever embarked upon by two countries, it also required decades of negotiation and the controversial relocation of thousands of people. Negotiating a River looks at the profound impacts of this megaproject, from the complex diplomatic negotiations, political manoeuvring, and environmental diplomacy to the implications on national identities and transnational relations.
Author: John Gatta
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195354605
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from fairly early in the nineteenth century into the later twentieth. This imaginative involvement with the Divine Woman -- verging at times on devotional homage -- is especially intriguing as manifested in the Protestant writers who are the focus of this study: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harold Frederic, Henry Adams, and T.S. Eliot. John Gatta argues that flirtation with the Marian cultus offered Protestant writers symbolic compensation for what might be culturally diagnosed as a deficiency of psychic femininity, or anima, in America. He argues that the literary configurations of the mythical Madonna express a subsurface cultural resistance to the prevailing rationalism and pragmatism of the American mind in an age of entrepreneurial conquest.
Author: Mary Dunn
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253052548
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
An essay collection that demonstrates how emotional ties and intimate affiliations remain critical to the dimensions of modern Christianity. Scholars of religion have come a long way since William James famously made of religion a matter between man and his maker. For decades now, they have been attentive to the ways in which religion takes shape as the product of broad social forces, focusing on the dynamics of power and culture as heuristics for understanding religious phenomena and experience. What, however, might they be missing by moving too quickly from one interpretative extreme to the other—and what might we learn about religion by staying in the interstitial space between the individual in her solitude and society as a whole? Religious Intimacies, edited by Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore, brings together nine scholars of modern Christianity to probe this in-between space. In essays that range from treatments of Jesuit-indigenous relations in early modern Canada to the erotics of contemporary black theology, each contributor makes the case for the study of the presence and power of affective ties and relational dynamics between friends, lovers, and intimate others (even things) as vital to the understanding of religion. “These thoughtful and probing essays convincingly show that ties built upon affect, family, and shared convictions have continued to inform lived religious experience in modern times and shape western Christianity in significant, sometimes surprising ways.” —Jodi Bilinkoff, University of North Carolina at Greensboro “A rich collection of essays that use intimate relationships to chart a course between ‘solitude and society.’” —Tamsin Jones, Trinity College
Author: Laura Alice Watt
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520277082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Point Reyes National Seashore has a long history as a working landscape, with dairy and beef ranching, fishing, and oyster farming; yet, since 1962 it has also been managed as a National Seashore. The Paradox of Preservation chronicles how national ideals about what a park “ought to be” have developed over time and what happens when these ideals are implemented by the National Park Service (NPS) in its efforts to preserve places that are also lived-in landscapes. Using the conflict surrounding the closure of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, Laura Alice Watt examines how NPS management policies and processes for land use and protection do not always reflect the needs and values of local residents. Instead, the resulting landscapes produced by the NPS represent a series of compromises between use and protection—and between the area’s historic pastoral character and a newer vision of wilderness. A fascinating and deeply researched book, The Paradox of Preservation will appeal to those studying environmental history, conservation, public lands, and cultural landscape management, and to those looking to learn more about the history of this dynamic California coastal region.
Author: Jen A. Huntley
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700619674
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Leader of the first tourist expedition into Yosemite in 1855, James Mason Hutchings became a tireless promoter of the valley-and of himself. Seeking to create an alternative to California's Gold Rush social chaos, Hutchings whetted the public enthusiasm for this unspoiled land by mass producing a lithograph of Yosemite Falls, while his Hutchings' California Magazine beat the drum for tourism. But because of his later legal imbroglios over the park, Hutchings was effectively written out of its history, and today he is largely viewed as an opportunist who made a career out of exploiting Yosemite. Now Jen Huntley removes the tarnish from Hutchings's image. She portrays him instead as a "connector" who brought artists to Yosemite and Yosemite to Americans, and uses his career as a lens through which to view the contests and debates surrounding the creation of Yosemite, and, by extension, America's emerging ethic of land conservation. Blending environmental and cultural history, she tracks Hutchings's professional trajectory amidst significant changes in nineteenth-century America, from technological advances in printing to the growth of tourism, from the birth of modern environmental movements to battles over public lands. Huntley uses Hutchings's legal battles with the government over ownership of land in the Yosemite Valley to analyze larger battles over public land management and national identity. She also explores the role of urban San Francisco in designating Yosemite a public park, shows how the Civil War transformed Yosemite from a regional icon to a national symbol of post-war redemption, and takes a closer look at Hutchings's relationship with John Muir. Making Yosemite sheds light on the role of power, class dynamics, and the late-century ideal of individualism in the shaping of modern America's sacred landscapes. Hutchings emerges here as a visionary communicator who cleverly tapped into midcentury Americans' attitudes toward spectacular scenery to create a sense of place-based identity in the American Far West. Huntley's revisionist approach rediscovers Hutchings as a key player in the histories of American media, tourism, and environmentalism, and suggests new terrain for scholars to consider in writing the histories of our national parks, conservation, and land policy.
