The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism

The Geographic Imagination of Modernity traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought in the decades around 1800. This period represents an extraordinary intellectual threshold, a time when European society invented new conceptual strategies for making sense of itself. Tang's book brings to light, for the first time, geography as one of the most important of these conceptual strategies. Tang's inquiry revolves, first of all, around the rise of geographic science, as it is in this science that the geographic imagination crystallizes. The second part of the book offers a systematic study of the key spatial categories of the modern geographic imagination, including orientation, cultural landscape, and geohistory. In reconstructing the emergence of geographic science and the modern semantics of geographic space, this book approaches the literary and philosophical discourses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from a radically new perspective.

Author: Chenxi Tang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 07/01/2008
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.41lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780804758390

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 08/15/2008 pg. 17
Reference and Research Bk News 11/01/2008 pg. 74
Choice 06/01/2009

About the Author
Chenxi Tang taught German literature at the University of Chicago before joining the Department of German at the University of California at Berkeley in 2007.