Picturing Tropical Nature
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: March 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780801438813
Subjects: History of ideas, intellectual history; History of science; Tropical Ecology; Metaphysics; Speculative Philosophy; Nature; Philosophy; Philosophy of nature; General; History; History - General; Tropics; Life Sciences - Ecology; Human ecology; In art
Description: "Whether as sublime landscape, malignant wilderness, or a site for environmental conflicts and ecotourism, tropical nature is to a great extent an American and European imaginative construct, conveyed in literature, travel writing, drawings, paintings, photographs, and diagrams. These images are central to Nancy Leys Stepan's view that a critical examination of the "tropicalization of nature" can remedy some of the most persistent misrepresentations of the region and its peoples.".

"Picturing Tropical Nature reflects on the work of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Sir Patrick Manson, and Margaret Mee.

Their careers illuminate several aspects of tropicalization: science and art in the making of tropical pictures; the commercial and cultural boom in things tropical in the modern period; photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races; antitropicalism and its role in an emerging environmentalist sensibility; and visual depictions of disease in the new tropical medicine."--BOOK JACKET.