Mapping American culture

Building on a renewed interest in the spatial and environmental dimension of American culture studies, Mapping American Culture begins the task of reading the American landscape. From the intimate inner geography of ordinary life to the daunting imposed spaces of the corporate state, these eleven newly written essays address the ways in which space has worked to condition everyday life as well as the grand actions of American experience. Each essayist lays claim to uncharted territory. In what amounts to the volume's keynote piece, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan stresses human attachment to place. Clarence Mondale, April Schultz, and Ray Allen extend Tuan's concern by probing the American migrant's uprooting and replanting as reflected in oral history, folklore, and gospel music. Concerned with the convergence of language and place, Don Scheese, Kinereth Meyer, and Kathleen Wallace probe the place-conscious Journal of Henry Thoreau, William Carlos Williams' New Jersey epic Paterson, and regional identity in midwestern women's autobiographies. Turning from texts to images and actual places, the last four essayists - Richard Keller Simon, Timothy Davis, Peter Bacon Hales, and Steven Marx - scan such resonantly modern topics as the shopping mall, American landscape photography since the 1930s, the Manhattan Project's secret cities, and the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. From a Massachusetts swamp to Minnesota's Lake Wobegon to Brooklyn's neighborhoods and beyond, these essays offer a series of rich and valuable insights for general readers and for scholars in American studies, literature, photography, and cultural history as well as cultural geography, folklore, landscape studies, and environmental studies.