Cover image for Fixing landscape : a techno-poetic history of China's Three Gorges
Fixing landscape : a techno-poetic history of China's Three Gorges
Title:
Fixing landscape : a techno-poetic history of China's Three Gorges

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Author:
Byrnes, Corey J., 1980- author.
ISBN:
9780231188067
Physical Description:
xv, 322 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 24 cm.
Series:
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Contents:
Passage I. Departure -- Part I. A landscape of traces. Tracing the gorges -- From trace to site -- Passage II. One thousand Li -- Part II. Reinscribing the Three Gorges. Chinese landscape -- Chinese labor -- Passage III. One thousand years -- Part III. For the record. A record of the trace -- Ink in the wound -- Passage IV. Part of the movement.
Abstract:
"This book is a cultural history of the Three Gorges, spanning 2,500 years and media as disparate as eighth-century poetry; travel essays and landscape painting from the twelfth through eighteenth centuries; nineteenth-century British travelogues, maps, and visual culture; and contemporary film, photography, and ink painting. Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam exists not only because the geology and hydrology of the region make it possible, but also because of the symbolic weight the region had acquired over millennia of cultural representation. Fully understanding how the Three Gorges landscape was produced and reproduced forces us to cut through familiar developmental narratives about modern China to see the connections between premodern, modern, semi-colonial, and contemporary periods of Chinese history, an important endeavor at a time when politicians and artists alike are drawing on an historical 'Chinese tradition,' the latter for aesthetic guidance, the former for legitimation. A methodologically hybrid book, Fixing Landscapes combines aspects of traditional Sinology with contemporary Chinese cultural studies, critical geography, art history, film studies, and theories of space and place. It is deeply engaged with the scholarship of the environmental humanities but it also seeks to broaden the horizons of that field to better reflect the importance of China"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliographical References:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-308) and index.
Field 805:
npmlib 10802349 DS793 Y3 B96 ysh
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