Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World - Paperback

by Denis Cosgrove (Author)

Leading geographer Denis Cosgrove provides a series of personal reflections on the complex connections between seeing, imagining and representing the world geographically. In a series of eloquent essays he draws upon pictorial images - including maps, sketches, cartoons, paintings, and photographs - to explore and elaborate upon the many and varied ways in which the vast and varied earth, and at times the heavens beyond, have been both imagined and represented as a place of human habitation. The essays include reflections upon geographical discovery; urban cartography and utopian visions; ideas of landscape and the shaping of America; wilderness and masculinity; conceptions of the Pacific; and the imaginative grip of the Equator. Extensively illustrated, this engaging work reveals the richness of the geographical imagination as expressed over the past five centuries.

Author Biography

Denis Cosgrove is 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 GeographiesGeographies of Mountains and Ice (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming).