Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien's Cartographies - Couverture souple

Behrooz, Anahit

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1350290807 ISBN 13 : 9781350290808

Editeur : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

Synopsis

In this cutting-edge study of Tolkien’s most critically neglected maps, Anahit Behrooz examines how cartography has traditionally been bound up in facilitating power. Far more than just illustrations to aid understanding of the story, Tolkien’s corpus of maps are crucial to understanding the broader narratives between humans and their political and environmental landscapes within his legendarium. Undertaking a diegetic literary analysis of the maps as examples of Middle-earth’s own cultural output, Behrooz reveals a sub-created tradition of cartography that articulates specific power dynamics between mapmaker, map reader, and what is being mapped, as well as the human/nonhuman binary that represents human’s control over the natural world. Mapping Middle-earth surveys how Tolkien frames cartography as an inherently political act that embodies a desire for control of that which it maps. In turn, it analyses harmful contemporary engagements with land that intersect with, but also move beyond, cartography such as environmental damage; human-induced geological change; and the natural and bodily costs of political violence and imperialism. Using historical, eco-critical, and postcolonial frameworks, and such theorists as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and Edward Said, this book explores Tolkien’s employment of particular generic tropes including medievalism, fantasy, and the interplay between image and text to highlight, and at times correct, his contemporary socio-political epoch and its destructive relationship with the wider world.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Anahit Behrooz is an independent research scholar and arts journalist. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK and has taught at Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University. Her work has been published in Walking Tree's anthology Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J. R. R. Tolkien's Works, its Precursors, and Legacies and Fastitocalon, and The University of Edinburgh's The Dangerous Women Project.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1350290807
• ISBN 13: 9781350290808
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 198
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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