Nature's Nation


Book Description

This multidisciplinary book offers the first broad ecocritical review of American art and examines the environmental contexts of artistic practice from the colonial period to the present day. Tracing how visions of the environment have changed from the Native-European encounter to the emergence of modern ecological activism, more than a dozen scholars and practitioners discuss how artists have both responded to and actively instigated changes in ecological understanding.




Nature and Its Symbols


Book Description

"The Guide to Imagery series introduces readers to important visual vocabulary of Western art."--Back cover.




Earth to Earth


Book Description

My photographs are made with the same sunlight that powers all the earth's living systems. --Martin Hill * Reminiscent of the internationally best-selling Earth from Above, Martin Hill's Earth to Earth transforms the beauty of everyday items found in nature and elevates them to ecological art. Ecology is a science that is entering its renaissance as issues of global warming, greenhouse emissions, and ozone depletion make their way from scientific debates and newspaper headlines to family breakfast tables. Environmental photographer Martin Hill and project collaborator Philippa Jones visit remote locations around the globe to create a stunning array of evocative photographs that represent a visual circle of life promoting ecological sustainability and responsibility. In addition to an eloquent introduction by Sir Edmund Hillary, ecologically minded quotes and facts appear throughout the collection: * Each day more solar energy falls to the earth than the total amount of energy the planet's six billion inhabitants would consume in 25 years. * What use is a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? In Earth to Earth Hill presents more than 70 transcendent four-color photographs that capture images of natural items found in nature, which he then transforms into exquisitely intricate sculptural masterpieces. Prior to leaving each location--whether at the top of a snow-covered mountain or on the sand-blown shores of a windy beach--Hill ensures that each site is left exactly as it was found.




Art and Nature in the Anthropocene


Book Description

This book examines how contemporary artists have engaged with histories of nature, geology, and extinction within the context of the changing planet. Susan Ballard describes how artists challenge the categories of animal, mineral, and vegetable—turning to a multispecies order of relations that opens up a new vision of what it means to live within the Anthropocene. Considering the work of a broad range of artists including Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Yhonnie Scarce, Joyce Campbell, Lisa Reihana, Katie Paterson, Taryn Simon, Susan Norrie, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Ken + Julia Yonetani, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Angela Tiatia, and Hito Steyerl and with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book reveals the emergence of a planetary aesthetics that challenges fixed concepts of nature in the Anthropocene. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, narrative nonfiction, digital and media art, and the environmental humanities.




William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design


Book Description

This work presents new material in the form of art, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. These documents expand our knowledge of Bartram as an explorer, naturalist, artist, writer, and citizen of the early Republic.




The Spenser Encyclopedia


Book Description

'This masterly work ought to be The Elizabethan Encyclopedia, and no less.' - Cahiers Elizabethains Edmund Spenser remains one of Britain's most famous poets. With nearly 700 entries this Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive one-stop reference tool for: * appreciating Spenser's poetry in the context of his age and our own * understanding the language, themes and characters of the poems * easy to find entries arranged by subject.




Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies


Book Description

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work—both published and unpublished—that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part II, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. With essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.




Building Natures


Book Description

In Building Natures, Julia Daniel establishes the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created by these new professions in the early twentieth century. The modern poets who capture these parks in verse explore the aesthetic principles and often failed democratic ideals embedded in the designers’ verdant architectures. The poetry of Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore foregrounds the artistry behind our most iconic green spaces. At the same time, it demonstrates how parks framed, rather than ameliorated, civic anxieties about an increasingly diverse population living and working in dense, unhealthy urban centers. Through a combination of ecocriticism, urban studies, and historical geography, Building Natures unveils the neglected urban context for seemingly natural landscapes in several modernist poems, such as Moore’s "An Octopus" and Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, while contributing to the dismantling of the organic-mechanic divide in modernist studies and ecocriticism.




Strange Tools


Book Description

A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.




Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art


Book Description

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding Schelling's philosophical development from his early works in 1795-1796 through his theological turn in 1809-1810. Schelling's philosophy of art is the 'keystone' of the system; it unifies his idea of freedom and his philosophy of nature. Schelling's idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant's and Fichte's practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw's careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.