Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics

Description

The roots of environmental aesthetics reach back to the ideas of eighteenth-century thinkers who found nature an ideal source of aesthetic experience. Today, having blossomed into a significant subfield of aesthetics, environmental aesthetics studies and encourages the appreciation of not just natural environments but also human-made and human-modified landscapes. Nature and Landscape is an important introduction to this rapidly growing area of aesthetic understanding and appreciation. Allen Carlson begins by tracing the development of the field's historical background, and then surveys contemporary positions on the aesthetics of nature, such as scientific cognitivism, which holds that certain kinds of scientific knowledge are necessary for a full appreciation of natural environments. Carlson next turns to environments that have been created or changed by humans and the dilemmas that are posed by the appreciation of such landscapes. He examines how to aesthetically appreciate a variety of urban and rural landscapes and concludes with a discussion of whether there is, in general, a correct way to aesthetically experience the environment.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Similar books

• 

  Rethinking Landscape: A Critical Reader

  By Ian H. Thompson

  This carefully selected collection of readings and commentary expertly guides the reader through the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape, and explores the key writings which shaped the ...

• 

  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

  By Andrew Light, Jonathan M. Smith

  I shall put forward an existential account of the phenomenon of the everyday and its aesthetic character. In this context, I am not interested in the popular arts, nor shall I look at the problems of the aesthetics of living or the ...

• 

  Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty

  By Allen Carlson, Sheila Lintott

  ... Natural Beauty Without Metaphysics , " in Kemal and Gaskell , eds . , Landscape , Natural Beauty and the Arts . 9. Ibid . , p . 55 . 10. Carlson , " Appreciation and the Natural Environment , " p . 276 . 11. Ibid . 12. This is the way ...

• 

  Literature and Weather: Shakespeare - Goethe - Zola

  By Johannes Ungelenk

  The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola's The Rougon-Macquarts.