Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

I-Chun Wang

Cultural Discourse in Taiwan

Simon C. Estok

Jonathan White

Written from within the best traditions of ecocritical thought, this book provides a wide-ranging account of the spatial imagination of landscape and seascape in literary and cultural contexts from many regions of the world. It brings together essays by authors writing from within diverse cultural traditions, across historical periods from ancient Egypt to the postcolonial and postmodern present, and touches on an array of divergent theoretical interventions. The volume investigates how our spatial imaginations become "wired," looking at questions about mediation and exploring how various traditions compete for prominence in our spatial imagination. In what ways is personal experience inflected by prevailing cultural traditions of representation and interpretation? Can an individual maintain a unique and distinctive spatial imagination in the face of dominant trends in perception and interpretation? What are the environmental implications of how we see landscape? The book reviews how landscape is at once conceptual and perceptual, illuminating several important themes including the temporality of space, the mediations of place that form the response of an observer of a landscape, and the development of response in any single life from early, partial thoughts to more considered ideas in maturity. Chapters provide suggestive and culturally nuanced propositions from varying points of view on ancient and modern landscapes and seascapes and on how individuals or societies have arranged, conceptualized, or imagined circumambient space. Opening up issues of landscape, seascape, and spatiality, this volume commences a wide-ranging critical discussion that includes various approaches to literature, history and cultural studies. Bringing together research from diverse areas such as ecocriticism, landscape theory, colonial and postcolonial theory, hybridization theory, and East Asian Studies to provide a historicized and global account of our ecospatial imaginations, this book will be useful for scholars of landscape ecology, ecocriticism, physical and social geography, postcolonialism and postcolonial ecologies, comparative literary studies, and East Asian Studies.

Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination

Mary Theis

This volume celebrates a fascinating variety of nonfiction known as life writing. This genre resonates quintessentially with the core of the humanities in its profoundly individual ways of fusing narrators with their narrative subjects. The book brings together scholars from around the world to explore the personal mapping of such narrators in the context of their cultural legacies. The hybrid fusions themselves form several subgenres that complement each other as they affirm human dignity and values and our need for human connection, felt at all times, but especially during times of globally met threats. The ever-expanding forms of hybridography here—along with testimonies, diaries, letters and journals—bear witness to how individuals have contrived to overcome their own traumatic sources of pain and suffering to discover joy and how to further map their pathways forward. The narratives not only communicate important information and aesthetic beauty needed to prolong troubled lives due to social anxiety or mental illness, but also challenge sociocultural issues involving stigma, migration, racial discrimination and persecution, human trafficking, and ecological concerns. Global in scope, personal in focus, and historically and culturally contextualized, the analyses provided here once again illustrate how much we have to learn from each other.

Life Mapping as Cultural Legacy

Throughout history cities have been locations of human encounter. Equally they have been contexts for the trade of goods and services, for the evolution of various forms of urban space, and for the production, development, and enrichment of culture and technology. Many cities grew up along shorelines, which themselves constitute some of the globe’s most important cultural boundaries. For above all else, it is water that has separated but also connected different communities, races, religions and nations, down through recorded time. With the rapid advance in technologies of communication, encounters between cultures have multiplied at a rate that no individual can follow or control. The present book constitutes a space of “memory” in its own right, one of its chief raisons d’être being that a group of diverse scholars herein maps certain key encounters between peoples, past as well as present, and the urgent issues generated in consequence. No one person could have traced such diversity and made sense of it, whereas a scholarly grouping of persons reporting on phenomena from around the world, such as is provided here, offers its readers a vision of global change and development. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of mega-cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centres. This expanded landscape is here interpreted with special attention, as already mentioned, to cities located at coastlines, hence (generally speaking) more exposed to globalizing trends. Migrants, exiles and refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, as well as alternative or countercultural groupings continue to complicate the ways in which cities articulate their now pluralized identities, in terms of (and by means of) literature, history, architecture, social events, and other forms of artistic and cultural production. The international scholars whose work is assembled in these pages are well placed to engage with the intersecting themes and issues of the volume. Contributors have mapped different examples from Homeric narrative, through Renaissance drama and its representation of crossways of culture such as Rhodes and Malta, to an earlier time in the development of a New World city such as Boston: others look at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ complexity of great world cities and of oceanic migration or trade between them. Shanghai, Singapore, London, Detroit, Shantou, Macau, and Saigon are some that are dealt with in detail. Emphasis falls on both the historical reality of those contexts as well as how they have been culturally represented.

I-Chun Wang

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