The Poetics and Politics of the Desert - Landscape and the Construction of America (Hardcover)


This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, "The Poetics and Politics of the Desert" investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

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Product Description

This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, "The Poetics and Politics of the Desert" investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

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Product Details

General

Imprint

Editions Rodopi B.V.

Country of origin

Netherlands

Series

Spatial Practices, 6

Release date

2009

Availability

Supplier out of stock. If you add this item to your wish list we will let you know when it becomes available.

First published

2009

Authors

Dimensions

235 x 155 x 28mm (L x W x T)

Format

Hardcover

Pages

357

ISBN-13

978-90-420-2496-0

Barcode

9789042024960

Categories

LSN

90-420-2496-8



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