Imagined Country: Environment, Culture and Society

"Imagined Country" attempts to describe the relationship between society and the physical world through representation. The myths and symbols of spaces reveal how society regards its environment. As cultural perception shifts, altered by location and time, so its representations of the physical environment change. Analysis of such representation can disclose not only the reasons but the understanding behind the myths and symbols of the natural world. John Short describes the varying images of wilderness, countryside and city as they are expressed in cultural forms. His analysis focuses on the cinema in North America, British literature and Australian painting. The choice of media may reflect national ideology as may the specific representation itself. However, the book's aim is not to compare countries but to explore a physical and metaphorical geography in search of motifs, of archetypes of land and man. This book should be of interest to environmental studies, geography, history of ideas, cultural studies, film, literature, art studies, psychology, sociology and general readership.