Picturing Tropical Nature (Reaktion Books - Picturing History)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
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
Picturing Tropical Nature (Reaktion Books - Picturing History),Nancy Leys Stepan,Reaktion Books,1861891466,20th century,Cultural studies,Essays,Forests, rainforests,General,History,History - General,Nature,Nature / Field Guide Books,Photo Techniques,Photography,Science/Mathematics,Social history,Subjects & Themes - General,c 1800 to c 1900,History / General
Discount Books:
Recommended Books