Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America's National Parks

by Richard Grusin

Overview

Richard Grusin's innovative study investigates how the establishment of national parks contributed to the development of American national identity after the Civil War. Although parks are seen as an uncomplicated means of environmental preservation, Grusin argues that they must also be understood as complex cultural technologies dedicated to the reproduction of nature as landscape art. He explores the origins of America's three major parks—Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon—in relationship to other forms of landscape representation, including photography, mapping, travel writing and fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521081689
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/18/2008
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #137
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Richard Grusin is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Higher Criticism and the Institutional Authority of the Bible (1991) and co-author (with Jay David Bolter) of Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999).

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.

Editorial Reviews

"The evidence (Grusin) invokes is fascinating, and serves to freshly illuminate the cultural landscape from which our first national parks emerged. Recommended." M.A. Olshan, Alfred University, CHOICE

"Grusin presents historians with a fresh outlook on the parks that will inspire further creative efforts." - James Pritchard, Iowa State University

From the Publisher