Gardens and Imagination : Cultural History and Agency

by Conan, Michel

• ISBN13: 9780884023357
• ISBN10: 0884023354
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-30
• Publisher: Dumbarton Oaks Pub Service

Summary

From mirroring the true reality of God in Sufi Persia to the enjoyment of fictitious identities in Rome or present-day Granada, the ways of imagination in gardens are infinitely varied. This book explores how gardens could be imagined, and also how they could be used to trigger the imagination by very different cultures in Japan, China, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Spain, and Israel. This multicultural approach reveals surprising features of the process of imagining a garden: the various aspects of the world that gardens may mirror, the role of cultural changes, and the unsuspected links between garden materiality, practices, and imagination. It reveals how garden imagination is fraught with ambiguities that give a sense of freedom to garden users but may entrap their thoughts within frames specific to each culture.

Table of Contents

Methods and Perspectives for the Study of Gardens and their Reception	p. 3
The Traces of the Traces: Reflections of the Garden in the Persian Mystical Imagination	p. 19
Body and Imagination in Urban Gardens of Song and Yuan	p. 41
Sons' Memorial Gardens and the Israeli Cultural Imagination	p. 67
Gardens - Real and Imagined - in the Social Ecology of Early Modern Ottoman Culture	p. 91
Landscapes of Ruin and the Imagination in the Antiquarian Gardens of Renaissance Rome	p. 117
Perception and Representation of Famous Sites in Japanese Culture: The Significance of Meisho in Landscape and Garden Imagination	p. 139
The Country Estate and Russian Literary Imagination (1761-1917)	p. 165
Mirrors and Windows: Fictional Imagination in Later Chinese Garden Culture	p. 191
"Mt. Sumeru in a Mustard Seed": Imagery and Polemics in Wang Shizhen's Garden Essays	p. 207
Dramatizing Garden Imagination in Baroque Spain	p. 225
Index	p. 250
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