This book explores the role of the ideology of nature in producing urban and exurban sprawl. It examines the ironies of residential development on the metropolitan fringe, where the search for “nature” brings residents deeper into the world from which they are imagining their escape—of Federal Express, technologically mediated communications, global supply chains, and the anonymity of the global marketplace—and where many of the central features of exurbia—very low-density residential land use, monster homes, and conversion of forested or rural land for housing—contribute to the very problems that the social and environmental aesthetic of exurbia attempts to avoid. The volume shows how this contradiction—to live in the green landscape, and to protect the green landscape from urbanization—gets caught up and represented in the ideology of nature, and how this ideology, in turn, constitutes and is constituted by the landscapes being urbanized.

In this work of interdisciplinary scholarship, Stephen A. Germic reveals how America's first parks, both urban and "wilderness," were created and organized to mitigate the most threatening social and economic crises in the nineteenth century outside of the Civil War. Germic analyzes the intentionally disguised relationship between the constructed "nature" of Central Park, Yosemite, and Yellowstone and the expanding but crisis-prone capitalist state. American Green demonstrates how the fundamental function of these parks was economic and political--in the service of maintaining a consensus regarding national identity. The organization and control of "natural" space, Germic argues, is inseparable from its function as a capitalist instrument. This instrumentalism served not only to define, constitute, and segregate social groups, but also to promote racial and ethnic identifications above those based on class interest. Providing a fresh insight into United States labor, cultural and environmental history, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of American parks and the complex meaning of American public space.

In this work of interdisciplinary scholarship, Stephen A. Germic reveals how America's first parks, both urban and 'wilderness,' were created and organized to mitigate the most threatening social and economic crises in the nineteenth century outside of the Civil War. Germic analyzes the intentionally disguised relationship between the constructed 'nature' of Central Park, Yosemite, and Yellowstone and the expanding but crisis-prone capitalist state. American Green demonstrates how the fundamental function of these parks was economic and political—in the service of maintaining a consensus regarding national identity. The organization and control of 'natural' space, Germic argues, is inseparable from its function as a capitalist instrument. This instrumentalism served not only to define, constitute, and segregate social groups, but also to promote racial and ethnic identifications above those based on class interest. Providing a fresh insight into United States labor, cultural and environmental history, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of American parks and the complex meaning of American public space.

Publisher description

In this interdisciplinary study, Ann Bermingham explores the complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory relationship between English landscape painting and the socio-economic changes that accompanied enclosure and the Industrial Revolution.

Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America examines anti-colonial discourse during the understudied but critical period before World War Two, with a specific focus on writers and activists based in the United States. Dohra Ahmad adds to the fields of American Studies, utopian studies, and postcolonial theory by situating this growing anti-colonial literature as part of an American utopian tradition. In the key early decades of the twentieth century, Ahmad shows, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed literary texts--novels, poems, contemplative essays--in order to conceptualize the new societies they sought. Beginning by exploring some of the conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, Landscapes of Hope goes on to show the surprising ways in which writers such as W.E B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, and Punjabi nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai appropriated and adapted those utopian conventions toward their own end of global colored emancipation.

The concept of 'wilderness' as a foundational idea for environmentalist thought has become the subject of vigorous debates. Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives offers a taxonomy of the forms that wilderness writing has taken in Australian and Canadian literature, re-emphasizing both country's origins as colonies.

This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.