Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes - Brossura

Edmond, Martin

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1869404475 ISBN 13: 9781869404475

Casa editrice: Auckland Univ Pr, 2009

Riassunto

Imaginative and cerebral, this volume recounts the fantastic history of the antipodes—namely Australia and New Zealand—from the Western perspective over the course of the past five millennia. Tracing the fiction underlying the fact in the tales of, among others, Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Thomas More, this remarkable compilation explores the imagination of travelers, writers, map-makers, charlatans, and rogues who dreamed of other worlds. Delving into the Australian character and the New Zealand psyche, this account also conveys an insightful glimpse into Western history.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Martin Edmond is a screenwriter, a poet, an editor, and the author of numerous books, including Chronicle of the Unsung, which won the Montana New Zealand Book Award, and Luca Antara.

Product Description:

In the tradition of Dava Sobel and Longitude, award-winning writer Martin Edmond uses his extraordinary intellectual breadth and imaginative reach to elegantly and lucidly execute his most ambitious project to date - the history of 4,000 years of the Western imagination and the Antipodes, Great Southern Land, Zone of the Marvellous. Australia and New Zealand were imagined for thousands of years before they became real. From Plato's Atlantis to Dante's Mount Purgatory, from Sinbad the Sailor to Abel Tasman, travellers, writers, mapmakers, charlatans have dreamt of a fabled land on the far side of the world. In this far-ranging cultural history - 'from Gilgamesh to Shane Cotton' - Martin Edmond traverses vast territories of time and space, of human fortitude and imagination. While Ptolemy imagined a Great South Land to balance the weight of Northern Hemisphere continents on his maps and Phoenecian, Greek, and Roman sailors began voyaging down the African coast, thinkers from Plato to Dante, Milton, and Defoe were imagining paradise (or its opposite) at the bottom of the South Seas. Would you find pearls or purgatory or lost tribes in the antipodes? And whose fantastic tales should one trust? Even after the South Seas have long been discovered and settled, Edmond finds the tradition of the antipodes as 'Zone of the Marvellous' still exerts a powerful hold, over artists such as Sydney Nolan, Colin McCahon, Fiona Hall and Shane Cotton and writers such as James K Baxter and Janet Frame.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Auckland Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1869404475
• ISBN 13: 9781869404475
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 258