Views and Visions of the Tropical World

Abstract

Abstract This book brings together contributors from various disciplinary backgrounds—principally, art history, cultural geography, literature, imperial history, and the history of science—to consider the visualization of the tropical world. This book is especially concerned with the ways in which “the tropics” have been represented as something to be seen—a view to be had or a vision to be experienced. In the book, spaces of the tropics have been imagined in a wide variety of ways, within diverse forms of writing, sketching, mapping, charting, panoramas, painting, and photography. In very general terms, the words “view” and “vision” are used here to capture two contrasting modalities through which the tropics have been pictured. The view emerged in the context of a topographical aesthetic in which landscapes are depicted at a distance, their surface features translated into a recognizable visual code. In this very general sense, the term belongs equally to landscape sketching, coastal survey, and terrestrial mapping; it is part of a topographic culture in which the world is apprehended from afar.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.