Voyage Into Substance

Voyage Into Substance PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262192231
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 645

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Book Description
Voyage into Substance reopens the whole complex question of how nature was perceived and penetrated during the Enlightenment - a time when artist-scientists trekked across Egyptian deserts, astronomer-mariners navigated the Polar seas, and meteorologist-aeronauts "sailed" through the atmosphere's "waves," all seeking to discover and record the non-human likeness of the phenomenal world. By examining the popular, multi-national illustrated narratives and atlases of the period, the book relates the voyagers' attentive, firsthand mode of seeing and precise copying of the enduring and the ephemeral features of the environment (before the advent of photography) to the major philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic debates of the time. Arguing that these accounts disclose an anti-Picturesque tradition of representation, the book opens new doors to establish the persistence of a "plain," that is, a style of landscape depiction that culminates in 19th-century realism. Voyage into Substance analyzes a vast repertory of geological, mineralogical and biological treatises concerning the self-expressive physiognomy of the earth and shows them to be important precursors and allies of the non-fictional travel narrative. Intertwining art, literature, philosophy, geography, and the history of science, with the aid of 304 plates, the book adds significantly to all these disciplines and is a unique contribution to the field of art and architectural history as well as to modern intellectual history. Barbara Maria Stafford is Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. Publication of this book was partially funded by the Millard Meiss Fund of the College Art Association of America and by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Voyage Into Substance

Voyage Into Substance PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780264192239
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 645

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Book Description


Body Criticism

Body Criticism PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262691659
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
In this erudite and profusely illustrated history of perception, Barbara Stafford explores a remarkable set of body metaphors deriving from both aesthetic and medical practices that were developed during the enlightenment for making visible the unseeable aspects of the world. While she focuses on these metaphors as a reflection of the changing attitudes toward the human body during the period of birth of the modern world, she also presents a strong argument for our need to recognize the occurrence of a profound revolution—a radical shift from a textbased to a visually centered culture. Stafford agues, in fact, that modern societies need to develop innovative, nonlinguistic paradigms and to train a broad public in visual aptitude.

Four Centuries of Geological Travel

Four Centuries of Geological Travel PDF Author: Patrick Wyse Jackson
Publisher: Geological Society of London
ISBN: 9781862392342
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Four Centuries of Geological Travel: The Search for Knowledge on Foot, Bicycle, Sledge and Camel focuses on the complexities of geological exploration and will be of particular interest to earth scientists, historians of science and to the general reader interested in science.

Voyages and Visions

Voyages and Visions PDF Author: Jaś Elsner
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861890207
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
A much-needed contribution to the expanding interest in the history of travel and travel writing, Voyages and Visions is the first attempt to sketch a cultural history of travel from the sixteenth century to the present day. The essays address the theme of travel as a historical, literary and imaginative process, focusing on significant episodes and encounters in world history. The contributors to this collection include historians of art and of science, anthropologists, literary critics and mainstream cultural historians. Their essays encompass a challenging range of subjects, including the explorations of South America, India and Mexico; mountaineering in the Himalayas; space travel; science fiction; and American post-war travel fiction. Voyages and Visions is truly interdisciplinary, and essential reading for anyone interested in travel writing. With essays by Kasia Boddy, Michael Bravo, Peter Burke, Melissa Calaresu, Jesus Maria Carillo Castillo, Peter Hansen, Edward James, Nigel Leask, Joan-Pau Rubies and Wes Williams.

Artful Science

Artful Science PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262691819
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Reveals the "magic" of learning in the 18th century. This text draws on historical sources and popular imagery to make the case for the pedagogical opportunities - suggesting ways of putting intelligence, enjoyment and communicative power back into thinking with images.

Visual Analogy

Visual Analogy PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262692670
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A groundbreaking book exploring the discovery of sameness in otherness. Recuperating a topic once central to philosophy, theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics, this groundbreaking book explores the discovery of sameness in otherness. Analogy poses an intriguingly ancient and modern conundrum. How, in the face of cultural diversity, can a unique someone or something be perceived as like what it is not? This book is for anyone puzzled by why today, as Barbara Maria Stafford claims, "we possess no language for talking about resemblance, only an exaggerated awareness of difference." Well-designed images, Stafford argues, reveal the mind's intuitive leaps to connect known with unknown experience. The first of four wide-ranging chapters paints a challenging overview of several pressing contemporary issues. Cloning, legal controversies about social inequity, identity politics, electronic copying, and the mimicry of virtual reality expose the need for a nuanced theory of similitude. The second examines the historical tug-of-war between analogy and allegory, or disanalogy. Stafford provocatively suggests that, since the Romantic Era, we have been living in polarizingly allegorical times. The third roots this divisiveness within the momentous shift from a magical universe, modeled on sexual bonds, to an engineered world built of discrete automated units. Finally, recent developments in computational brain research notwithstanding, major phenomenological questions about memory, emotion, intelligence, and awareness beckon. In the fourth chapter, Stafford intervenes in the consciousness debates to propose a humanistic cognitive science with bridging/analogy at its artful core.

Echo Objects

Echo Objects PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226770524
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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The Story of the Voyage

The Story of the Voyage PDF Author: Philip Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521604260
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Study of voyage narratives, including Cook and Bligh, set in the context of British imperialism.

The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789-1914

The Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789-1914 PDF Author: Katarina Gephardt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317028112
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. She examines a wide range of autobiographical and fictional travel narratives to demonstrate that the imaginative geographies underpinning British ideas of Europe emerged from the spaces between fact and fiction. Adding texture to her study are her analyses of the visual dimensions of cross-cultural representation and of the role of evolving technologies in defining a shared set of rhetorical strategies. Gephardt argues that British writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe, anticipating the contradictory British discourse around European integration that involves both fear that the European super-state will violate British sovereignty and a desire to play a more central role in the European Union.