Geography and Vision Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World

by Cosgrove, Denis

• ISBN13: 9781850438472
• ISBN10: 1850438471
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-15
• Publisher: I. B. Tauris

Summary

Geography and Vision is a series of personal reflections by leading cultural geographer, Denis Cosgrove, on the complex connections between seeing, imagining and representing the world geographically. Ranging historically from the sixteenth century to the present day, the essays include reflections upon discovery and the role of imagination in giving it meaning; colonisation and sixteenth century gardening; the shaping of American landscapes; wilderness, imperial mappings and masculinity; urban cartography and utopian visions; conceptions of the Pacific; the cartography of John Ruskin; and the imaginative grip of the Equator. Extensively illustrated, this engaging work reveals the richness and complexity of the geographical imagination as expressed over the past five centuries.

Author Biography

The late Denis Cosgrove was Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography at the University of California Los Angeles. A founding editor of the journal Ecumene (now Cultural Geographies ), his previous books include The Palladian Landscape (1993), Social Formations and Symbolic Landscape (2nd edn 1998), Mappings (editor, 1999) and Apollo's Eye (2001), which won the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award in Geography & Earth Sciences.  He is co-editor, with Veronica della Dora, of High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming). 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. x
Introduction: Landscape, map and vision	p. 1
Geographic and cosmological visions	p. 13
Geography and vision	p. 15
Extra-terrestrial geography	p. 34
Landscape visions: Europe	p. 49
Gardening the Renaissance world	p. 51
Mapping Arcadia	p. 68
Landscape visions: America	p. 85
Measures of America	p. 87
Wilderness, habitable earth and the nation	p. 104
John Ruskin: vision, landscape and mapping	p. 119
The morphological eye	p. 121
Ruskin's European visions	p. 135
Cartographic visions	p. 153
Moving maps	p. 155
Carto-city	p. 169
Metageographic visions	p. 183
Seeing the Pacific	p. 185
Seeing the Equator	p. 203
Notes	p. 219
Index	p. 249
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