Storied Deserts

Storied Deserts

Author: Celina Osuna

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-28

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1040044689

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Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as "the human" and "the elemental". Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.


The World Atlas of Deserts and Drylands

The World Atlas of Deserts and Drylands

Author: David Thomas

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-10-22

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0691251975

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A richly illustrated atlas of the world’s deserts and drylands, their ecosystems, and their environments Deserts and drylands account for more than 40 percent of land on our planet. Characterized by a lack of water and extreme temperatures, they are the result of atmospheric stability, large landmass characteristics, rain shadows, and cold ocean currents. They appear harsh and hostile, but deserts and drylands are also exceptionally beautiful environments. Desert ecosystems often teem with diverse forms of life that exhibit astonishing ingenuity in the face of such forbidding conditions. The World Atlas of Deserts and Drylands takes readers on a guided tour of some of the most awe-inspiring desert environments on Earth, explaining their environmental and ecological dynamics and describing the techniques used to categorize and map them. From the ever-expanding Gobi of Mongolia and China to the ancient Namib of coastal Africa, this is the ultimate reference book for deserts. Features a wealth of color photos, maps, and infographics Describes the resilient and complex biodiversity of the world’s desert and dryland terrains Covers subtropical deserts, continental deserts, rain shadow deserts, and ocean margin deserts Addresses the challenges posed by global warming and human activity, and discusses solutions and opportunities Written by a team of leading experts


The Conquest of the Desert

The Conquest of the Desert

Author: Carolyne R. Larson

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2020-11-20

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0826362087

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For more than one hundred years, the Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885) has marked Argentina’s historical passage between eras, standing at the gateway to the nation’s “Golden Age” of progress, modernity, and—most contentiously—national whiteness and the “invisibilization” of Indigenous peoples. This traditional narrative has deeply influenced the ways in which many Argentines understand their nation’s history, its laws and policies, and its cultural heritage. As such, the Conquest has shaped debates about the role of Indigenous peoples within Argentina in the past and present. The Conquest of the Desert brings together scholars from across disciplines to offer an interdisciplinary examination of the Conquest and its legacies. This collection explores issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous-state relations, genocide, borderlands, and Indigenous cultures and land rights through essays that reexamine one of Argentina’s most important historical periods.


Wales

Wales

Author: Jan Morris

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13: 0241970245

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Jan Morris's magnificent book celebrates Wales and all things Welsh. Written as a deeply personal study, it reflects the rich bilingual literature and folklore of Wales, the buildings and wonderfully varied landscapes, the national character and humour, the historical predicaments and the political condition of this small but extraordinary country. Jan Morris is a distinguished historian as well as being one of the world's leading travel-writers. Her passionate love of Wales makes this a unique evocation.


Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry

Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry

Author: Matthew Jarvis

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2021-03-15

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1786837323

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Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry’ examines the question of how recent English-language poetry from Wales has responded to the diverse physical environments of Wales. The first volume to offer a sustained assessment of Welsh poetry in English within the context of recent developments in environmental literary criticism, this book also draws on aspects of human geography to explore the rich contemporary poetics of Welsh space and place. Opening with an examination of poets from the 1960s as well as the early work of R.S. Thomas, ‘Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry’ subsequently concentrates on the poetry of writers who have come to prominence since the 1970s: Gillian Clarke, Ruth Bidgood, Robert Minhinnick, Mike Jenkins, Christine Evans, and Ian Davidson.Close reading of key texts reveals the way in which these writers variously create Welsh places, landscapes, and environments – fashioning rural and urban spaces into poetic geographies that are both abundantly physical and inescapably cultural. Far from reducing Wales to mere scenery, the poetry that emerges from this book engages with the environments of Wales, not just for their own sake, but as a crucial way of exploring key issues in Welsh culture – from the negotiation of female identity in a land of masculine myths to the exploration of Welsh space in a global context.


THE WELSH REVIVAL

THE WELSH REVIVAL

Author: G.Campbell Morgan

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 161898098X

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G. Campbell Morgan, noted British evangelical, visited briefly and was deeply stirred by the movement's intensity. ""It is Pentecost continued, without a single moment's doubt,"" he reported. ""The meetings are absolutely without order, characterized from the first to the last by the orderliness of the Spirit of God."" ""There were organs, "" he continued, ""but silent; ministers, but among the rest of the people, rejoicing, and prophesying, only there was no preaching. Yet the Welsh revival is the revival of preaching to Wales. Everybody is preaching. No order, and yet it moves from day to day with matchless precision, with the order of an attacking force."" Morgan challenged Christians to discover the movement's principles: ""Let us listen for the Spirit, confess Christ, be absolutely at His disposal. Get things out of the way for God . . . your habit that you know is unholy; your method of business that will not bear the light of day; your unforgiving heart towards a church member


All That Is Wales

All That Is Wales

Author: M. Wynn Thomas

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2017-05-05

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1786830906

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Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country’s internal diversity. To that end, the author’s examined range – from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as ‘Margiad Evans’, to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a ‘micro-cosmopolitan country’, and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.