Abstract
Not easily defined, landscapes have a cultural orientation reflecting the diversity of users who inhabit them. For waterscapes, such as swamps, in the colonial and Early Republic periods of the United States, swamps were perceived initially as hostile and untamed lands to early settlers. To Native American populations and Diasporan Africans, the swamps represented sustenance and at times, freedom. By the mid-nineteenth century, a new appreciation for riverscapes, such as that of the Mississippi, Volga, or the Thames, emerged as major rivers assumed the role of national icons. By the beginning of the twentieth century, riverscape aesthetics expanded to include the engineered landscape of large-scale dams, such as Dnieperstroi in the Soviet Union. Contemporary riverscapes tout the restoration of rivers, particularly in urban settings. The remediation of the Fez River, restoring its sense of place in the Fez community, is one such example.
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Notes
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Further Reading
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David Briggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (University of Washington Press, 2012).
Jason Busch, et al., Currents of Change: Art and Life Along the Mississippi River, 1850–1861 (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Corey Byrnes, Fixing Landscapes: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984; repr., University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
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Stephen Daniels, “Liquid Landscapes: Southam, Constable, and the Art of the Pond,” British Art Studies 10 (2018), http://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-10/liquid-landscape
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Kenneth Robert Olwig, Landscape Nature and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).
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Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (Reaktion Books, 1994).
Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted, Rivers, Memory and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers (Berghahn, 2015).
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Pietz, D.A., Zeisler-Vralsted, D. (2021). Water and Landscapes. In: Water and Human Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67692-6_2
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