Cities and Wetlands The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture

by Giblett, Rod

• ISBN13: 9781474269827
• ISBN10: 1474269826
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-08-11
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world's great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment.

Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington.

Author Biography

Rod Giblett is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Research in Entertainment, Arts, Technology Education and Communications at Edith Cowan University, Australia. An environmental activist and conservationist, he is the author of 12 books, including Living with the Earth: Mastery to Mutuality (2004) and The Body of Nature and Culture (2008).

Table of Contents

Part I: Old Beginnings
1. Aquaterrapolises: Swamp Cities and Marsh Metropolises
2. Perth: 'The Swamps in the Back Streets'
Part II: European Cities and Wetlands
3. Paris: or Lutetia, 'the Filthy Marsh'
4. Venice: 'A Tropical Marshland, Steaming, Monstrous, Rank'
5. St Petersburg: 'Marooned on the Neva's Marsh Delta'
6. London: The 'Nether World' of 'the City of Dreadful Night'
7. Berlin: 'A Dingy City in a Marsh'
8. Hamburg: 'This Marshy, Watery City'
Part III: North American Cities and Wetlands
9. Boston: and the Back Bay Fens
10. New York: Set in 'a Mosquito-Infested Swamp'
11. Washington: 'A Discouraging Site Bordered by a Swamp'
12. New Orleans: The Swamp is No Place for a City
13. Chicago: 'Built in the Midst of a Great Level Swamp'
14. Toronto: 'Set in Malarial Lakeside Swamps'
Part IV: New Beginnings
15. Melbourne: 'The Marsh Will be Drained and Built Over'
16. The City as Body, the Earth as Body and the Body as Earth
Bibliography
Index