Picturing Tropical Nature

Informationen zum Autor Nancy Leys Stepan is Professor of History at Columbia University! New York. Her previous books include 'The Hour of Eugenics': Race! Gender and Nation (1991). Klappentext Whether considered a sublime landscape! malignant wilderness! or the endangered site of environmental conflicts! the tropics are! "Picturing Tropical Nature "argues! largely a construct of American and European imaginations. Nancy Leys Stephan asserts that images of the tropics conveyed through drawings! paintings! photographs! literature! and travel writings are central to what Stepan calls the "tropicalization of nature!" or the often harmful misrepresentation of the tropics and its peoples. She here examines several aspects of such tropicalization as they emerge through the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists! including Alexander von Humboldt! Alfred Russel Wallace! Louis Agassiz! Sir Patrick Manson! and Margaret Mee. From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines! "Picturing Tropical Nature "offers new insight into the convergence of the tropics with European and American science and art. "A brilliant and provocative book . . . the kind of book that carries forward a field in a single stride . . . undoubtedly the finest account of 'tropicality' we have."--"Social History of Medicine" Zusammenfassung In this work! Nancy Stepan explores the ways in which the Tropics! in particular tropical nature! places! animals and people! were imagined and presented in European culture from the 19th century on.

Product details

• Authors: Nancy Leys Stepan, N J Stephan
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.02.2006
• EAN: 9781861891464
• ISBN: 978-1-86189-146-4
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 222 mm x 19 mm
• Series: Picturing History; Picturing History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > Nature, technology > Nature: general, reference works; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries