Fixing Landscape

"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 ahistorical '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"--