Imagining the Book

Imagining the Book
Author: Stephen Kelly
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

Download Imagining the Book Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Contributors discuss early printed books and manuscripts between the 14th and 16th centuries under the section headings of: 'Imagined compilers and editors', 'Imagined patrons and collectors', Imagined readings and readers' and 'Beyond the book: verbal and visual cultures'.

Imagining Mars

Imagining Mars
Author: Robert Crossley
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2011-01-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0819571059

Download Imagining Mars Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Mars in the human imagination from the invention of the telescope to the present For centuries, the planet Mars has captivated astronomers and inspired writers of all genres. Whether imagined as the symbol of the bloody god of war, the cradle of an alien species, or a possible new home for human civilization, our closest planetary neighbor has played a central role in how we think about ourselves in the universe. From Galileo to Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Crossley traces the history of our fascination with the red planet as it has evolved in literature both fictional and scientific. Crossley focuses specifically on the interplay between scientific discovery and literary invention, exploring how writers throughout the ages have tried to assimilate or resist new planetary knowledge. Covering texts from the 1600s to the present, from the obscure to the classic, Crossley shows how writing about Mars has reflected the desires and social controversies of each era. This astute and elegant study is perfect for science fiction fans and readers of popular science.

Imagining Afghanistan

Imagining Afghanistan
Author: Nivi Manchanda
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108491235

Download Imagining Afghanistan Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

An innovative exploration of how colonial interventions in Afghanistan have been made possible through representations of the country as 'backward'.

Imagining Serengeti

Imagining Serengeti
Author: Jan Bender Shetler
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2007-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821442430

Download Imagining Serengeti Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists. With prose that is elegant in its simplicity and analysis that is forceful and compelling, Jan Bender Shetler brings the landscape memory of the Serengeti to life. She demonstrates how the social identities of western Serengeti peoples are embedded in specific spaces and in their collective memories of those spaces. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Shetler identifies core spatial images and reevaluates them in their historical context through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti is a lively environmental history that will ensure that we never look at images of the African landscape in quite the same way.

Imaging Sculpture

Imaging Sculpture
Author: Stanley Abe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-12-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9783777437583

Download Imaging Sculpture Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A new critical approach to understanding sculpture across cultures. Imagining Sculpture is the story of the absence of a powerful European idea: Sculpture. In China statues, stele, and other figural objects were made for millennia, but were not categorized as Sculpture. Imagining Sculpture explains how they were seen in China as objects beyond the category of Sculpture. Stanley Abe has written a series of short historical and fictional vignettes about travelers, scholars, officials, collectors, and antiquarians who encounter statues, figures, and effigies in China and the West from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Imagining Sculpture is visual, cinematic, and sumptuous, featuring rare photographs, paintings, sketches, letters, and ephemera. With little text, images propel the narrative.

Imagining the Past

Imagining the Past
Author:
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 1996-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820318108

Download Imagining the Past Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its “progress.” In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the “official” histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.

Imagining Religion

Imagining Religion
Author: Jonathan Z. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 1982
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0226763609

Download Imagining Religion Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review

Geohell

Geohell
Author: Matthew Kenner
Publisher:
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2016-11-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9781540877772

Download Geohell Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Humanity has never faced so many crises at once - and all of them are interconnected. So, at least, is the argument Matthew Kenner makes in Geohell: Imagining History in the Contemporary World, a philosophical meditation on the 6,000 year evolution of urban cultures that arose out of the origins of agriculture and settlement. Painting a snapshot of a present gone wrong, Kenner utilizes a broad grasp of history to intricately retrace the past steps that led to what he refers to as our 'metacrisis'. Combining a variety of subdisciplines within the humanities and social sciences and traversing a plethora of forms and eras of human culture, Kenner creates a unique approach for comprehending our greatest social problems. At times frustratingly complex and counterintuitive, the author nevertheless always returns to his rather simple home base: his desire to add to humanity's understanding of itself. Whether it leaves you repulsed or entranced, you won't see the world the same way once you've journeyed through Geohell.

Imagining Early Modern Histories

Imagining Early Modern Histories
Author: Elizabeth Ketner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134803907

Download Imagining Early Modern Histories Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Interpreting textual mediations of history in early modernity, this volume adds nuance to our understanding of the contributions fiction and fictionalizing make to the shape and texture of versions of and debates about history during that period. Geographically, the scope of the essays extends beyond Europe and England to include Asia and Africa. Contributors take a number of different approaches to understand the relationship between history, fiction, and broader themes in early modern culture. They analyze the ways fiction writers use historical sources, fictional texts translate ideas about the past into a vernacular accessible to broad audiences, fictional depictions and interpretations shape historical action, and the ways in which nonfictional texts and accounts were given fictional histories of their own, intentionally or not, through transmission and interpretation. By combining the already contested idea of fiction with performance, action, and ideas/ideology, this collection provides a more thorough consideration of fictional histories in the early modern period. It also covers more than two centuries of primary material, providing a longer perspective on the changing and complex role of history in forming early modern national, gendered, and cultural identities.

Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America

Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America
Author: Karen Melvin
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 082635923X

Download Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America teaches imaginative and distinctive approaches to the practice of history through a series of essays on colonial Latin America. It demonstrates ways of making sense of the past through approaches that aggregate more than they dissect and suggest more than they conclude. Sidestepping more conventional approaches that divide content by subject, source, or historiographical “turn,” the editors seek to take readers beyond these divisions and deep into the process of historical interpretation. The essays in this volume focus on what questions to ask, what sources can reveal, what stories historians can tell, and how a single source can be interpreted in many ways.