Culture, technology, and the creation of America's national parks
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Culture, technology, and the creation of America's national parks
(Cambridge studies in American literature and culture, 137)
Cambridge University Press, 2004
Available at 34 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
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Description and Table of Contents
Description
Richard Grusin's study investigates how the establishment of national parks participated in the production of American national identity after the Civil War. The creation of America's national parks is usually seen as an uncomplicated act of environmental preservation. Grusin argues, instead, that parks must be understood as complex cultural technologies for the reproduction of nature as landscape art. He explores the origins of America's three major parks - Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon - in relation to other forms of landscape representation in the late nineteenth century. He examines such forms as photography, painting, and mapping, plus a wide range of travel narratives, scientific and nature writing, and fiction. Grusin shows that while establishing a national park does involve preserving an area of land as a 'natural' rather than economic asset, a ranch or mine for instance, it also transforms the landscape into a culturally constructed object called 'nature'.
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Introduction - reproducing nature: the technology of national parks
- 1. Recreating Yosemite: landscape, nationalism, and the nature of aesthetic agency
- 2. Representing Yellowstone: art, science, and fidelity to nature
- 3. Recognizing the Grand Canyon: naming, sublimity, and the limits of mediation
- Conclusion - remediating nature: national parks as mediated public space
- Notes
- Index.
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