This text is an exploration of the origins and lasting influence of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, and, nature.

Marilyn Monroe is alive and well in the American imagination. She is the stuff of memory, living as icon, mysterious suicide, transgressive goddess—a character that tells the story of America itself. American Monroe explores the ways we remember Marilyn—from playing cards, books, and fan clubs, to female impersonators, political conspiracies, and high art, her ubiquitous presence informs our cultural common ground. Finding in Marilyn a "representative character" of our time, Baty explores some of the cultural lives she has been made to lead. We follow "the mediatrix" from the biographies by Mailer and Steinem, to the shadowy Kennedy connection, to the coroner Noguchi's obsession with the body of the dead star. Representations of Marilyn, Baty shows, displace neat categories of high and low culture, of public and private, male and female. She becomes a surface that mirrors everything it touches, a site upon which to explore the character of the postmodern condition. American Monroe is an innovative, scintillating look at the making and remaking of popular icons. It explores the vocabulary of memory as it moves the reader past vistas of American political culture. It seeks to understand Marilyn's enduring power and how, through our many-layered rememberings of her, we come to understand ourselves and our shared history.

Compiling nine authoritative essays spanning an extensive academic career, author Kenneth R. Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influences from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in landscape and beyond, this illustrated volume traces the idea of landscape from the ancient polis and theatre through to the present day.

A reflection on the metaphor of the body politic throughout American history

The Body Politic is the first comprehensive history of the significance and struggles over science in America.

Traditional narratives imply that art in early America was severely limited in scope. By contrast, these essays collectively argue that visual arts played a critical role in shaping an early American understanding of the body politic. American artists in the late colonial and early national periods enlisted the arts to explore and exploit their visions of the relationship of the American colonies to the mother country and, later, to give material shape to the ideals of modern republican nationhood. Taking a uniquely broad view of both politics and art, Shaping the Body Politic ranges in topic from national politics to the politics of national identity, and from presidential portraits to the architectures of the ordinary. The book covers subject matter from the 1760s to the 1820s, ranging from Patience Wright's embodiment of late colonial political tension to Thomas Jefferson's designs for the entry hall at Monticello as a museum. Paul Staiti, Maurie McInnis, and Roger Stein offer new readings of canonical presidential images and spaces: Jean-Antoine Houdon's George Washington, Gilbert Stuart's the Lansdowne portrait of Washington, and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. In essays that engage print and painting, portraiture and landscape, Wendy Bellion, David Steinberg, and John Crowley explore the formation of national identity. The volume's concluding essays, by Susan Rather and Bernard Herman, examine the politics of the everyday. The accompanying eighty-five illustrations and color plates demonstrate the broad range of politically resonant visual material in early America. Contributors Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware * John E. Crowley, Dalhousie University * Bernard L. Herman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Maurie D. McInnis, University of Virginia * Louis P. Nelson, University of Virginia * Susan Rather, University of Texas, Austin * Paul Staiti, Mount Holyoke College * Roger B. Stein, emeritus, University of Virginia * David Steinberg, Independent Scholar Thomas Jefferson Foundation Distinguished Lecture Series

Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia’s trafficking, Slow Food’s gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures. At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture. Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego

In the past decade various studies have examined how political humor may influence various political attitudes and voting behavior; whether it affects learning, cognition and media literacy, how it might shape political participation; how people process different forms of political humor; and more. This book is devoted to anticipating and addressing where the field of political humor and its effects will move in the next generation of scholarship, exploring the continued evolution of the study of political humor as well as the normative implications of these developments. It includes research accounting for important changes and developments "on the ground" in the political humor landscape. These include the fact that the cadre of late-night television hosts have completely changed in the past 3 years; there are now more late night television choices; and many hosts have become more overtly political in their presentations. Recommended for scholars of communication, media studies, and political science.

Landscape is now on the agenda in a new way. The increasing interest in justice, power and the political landscape expresses a sea change occurring in the meaning of landscape itself, from landscape as scenery to landscape as polity and place. As Lionella Scazzosi argues "The meaning of the term ‘landscape’ has become broader than that of a view or panorama, which characterized many national protection laws and policies until the middle of the 20th century, and that of environment or nature, to which it has often been limited during the recent years of environmentalist battles." This is reflected in the new European Landscape Convention, for which: "’Landscape’ means an area, as perceived by people." The tide thus has turned towards J. B. Jackson’s view of landscape as not "a scenic or ecological entity but as a political or cultural entity, changing in the course of history." It is in this socio-political context that it becomes necessary to consider the role of power, and the importance of justice, in the shaping of the landscape as an area of practice and performance with both cultural and environmental implications. This book was previously published as two special issues of Landscape Research.

Once the exclusive prerogative of domaine réservé, landscape has gained increasing importance in international law in recent years. Since the introduction of cultural landscapes within the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, and particularly since the adoption of the European Landscape Convention (ELC), emphasis has shifted beyond a scenic, preservationist approach towards a more dynamic, human-centred one. The focus is not only on outstanding landscapes, but also on the everyday and degraded landscapes where most people live and work. Landscape is land shaped by people, after all, and its protection, management and planning have a number of implications for democracy, human rights and spatial justice. Despite these links, however, there has been little legal scholarship on the topic. How does international law, which deals for the most part with universality, deal with something so region-specific and particular as landscape? What is the legal conception of landscape and what are the various roles played by international law in its protection? Amy Strecker assesses the institutional framework for landscape protection, analyses the interplay between landscape and human rights, and links the etymology and theory of landscape with its articulation in law.