Geography and Vision - (International Library of Human Geography) by Denis Cosgrove (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

'A richly evocative set of meditations on landscape and vision by a master craftsman', David Livingstone, OBE, Professor of Geography & Intellectual History, Queen's University, Belfast.

'The range of his topics is both their challenge and their excitement', John Dixon Hunt, Professor of History & Theory of Landscape, University of Pennsylvania.

'A richly evocative set of meditations on landscape and vision by a master craftsman. The essay format - a much neglected literary form in contemporary human geography - suits Cosgrove to perfection as he sketches and speculates, provokes and probes. Across myriad times and spaces, he displays for us the kaleidoscope of meanings that we humans have attached to the terrestrial sphere. Each essay is a delightful creation fashioned by an artist whose eye is informed throughout by a profound geographical sensibility.' -- David Livingstone, OBE, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History, Queen's University, Belfast

About the Author

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).