Geography and Vision

Leading geographer Denis Cosgrove provides a series of personal reflections on the complex connections between seeing imagining and representing the world geographically. In a series of eloquent essays he draws upon pictorial images - including maps sketches cartoons paintings and photographs - to explore and elaborate upon the many and varied ways in which the vast and varied earth and at times the heavens beyond have been both imagined and represented as a place of human habitation. The essays include reflections upon geographical discovery; urban cartography and utopian visions; ideas of landscape and the shaping of America; wilderness and masculinity; conceptions of the Pacific; and the imaginative grip of the Equator. Extensively illustrated this engaging work reveals the richness of the geographical imagination as expressed over the past five centuries.