Introduction
Chapter 1. The Guidebook and the View Book
Chapter 2. The Origin and Consequences of Pictorial and Scenic
Thinking
Chapter 3. The Rise of Collective Thinking and Landscape
Formation
Chapter 4. Landscape Commentary
Notes
Bibliography
Herbert Gottfried is professor emeritus in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.
In an unique collection, Herbert Gottfried has brought together a
remarkable range of mid- and late-nineteenth century American
tourist guidebooks. Told with an incisive gaze, Gottfried's work is
a groundbreaking study of a little-known but important aspect of
American publishing that brings important insights to American
cultural history
*Richard Gassan, American University of Sharjah*
In this fascinating and meticulously researched study—a guide to
the guidebook—Gottfried shows that tourism in the U.S. matured in a
period when an interconnected apparatus of railways, hotels,
travel-oriented entrepreneurialism, souvenirs and guidebooks
developed to facilitate travel. With books in particular to prepare
the travelers prior to departure, the landscape was not seen
innocently but through eyes that had already been rhetorically and
pictorially influenced. Landscape and the American Guidebook
provides insight into the touristic experience, into the guidebooks
and viewbooks that actively sought to produce the tourist’s
attitudes toward the world encountered, and ultimately into
American visual culture. A nuanced and thoughtful study of
landscape as form, text, and image.
*D. Fairchild Ruggles, University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign*
This well-written narrative examines historical images in tourism,
particularly guidebooks, view books, and postcards. Gottfried
(emer., landscape architecture, Cornell) describes historical
tourism-related visual images and offers a semiotic assessment of
their meanings and messages. He covers a wide range of topics of
considerable interest to historians, geographers, and other
scholars interested in the evolutions and meanings of places,
tourism's role in these changes, and how these transformations play
out in photographic or drawn representations. The work is cloaked
in a US-centric exploration of the heritage of tourism's material
culture without regard for its larger global context, but this is
made clear in the title. With photographic and drawn images as the
data source, the author illuminates several very important areas of
debate in the current tourism literature, including the evolution
of US cultural landscapes, regional identity as portrayed in
tourism images, and travelers' search for authentic places and
experiences. Gottfried's treatment of three elements of tourism
material culture that are decreasing in relevance today with
advances in technology and virtual communications—view books,
postcards, and guidebooks—is needed to help preserve the history of
this element of the visual material culture of tourism. Summing Up:
Recommended.
*CHOICE*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
