Wasteland A History

In Wasteland, Vittoria Di Palma takes on the and#147;anti-picturesque,and#8221; offering an account of landscapes that have traditionally drawn fear and contempt. Di Palma argues that a convergence of beliefs, technologies, institutions, and individuals in 18th-century England resulted in the formulation of cultural attitudes that continue to shape the ways we evaluate landscape today. Staking claims on the aesthetics of disgust, she addresses how emotional response has been central to the development of ideas about nature, beauty, and sublimity. With striking illustrations reaching back to the 1600sand#151;husbandry manuals, radical pamphlets, gardening treatises, maps, and landscape paintingsand#151; Wasteland spans the fields of landscape studies, art and architectural history, geography, history, and the history of science and technology. In stirring prose, Di Palma tackles our conceptions of such hostile territories as swamps, mountains, and forests, arguing that they are united not by any essential physical characteristics but by the aversive reactions they inspire.

and#8220;Vittoria Di Palma has taken on the unconventional challenge of defining a subject that is and#8216;a foil to the notion of an ideal landscape,and#8217; and provides a valuable, original, and rigorous assessment of major themes in landscape studies, with sound historical and intellectual reasoning.and#8221;and#8212;Therese Oand#8217;Malley, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art

and#8220;This is a wonderful book, a history of the senses, and sensibilities, that people have brought to landscape. Vittoria di Palma writes with a terrific combination of critical intelligence and palpable delight in her material.and#8221;and#8212; Jedediah Purdy, Duke University School of Law

Winner of the 2015 J.B. Jackson Prize sponsored by the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Won an Honorable Mention for the 2015 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in the Architecture and Urban Planning category.

Winner of the 2014-15 Louis Gottschalk Prize, given by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

andldquo;Di Palmaand#39;s work, which conjoins the resources of art history, landscape and garden studies, the history of science, and more disciplines still, is a scholarly tour-de-force that synthesizes disparate studies of subjects ranging from land enclosure to the sublime in order to shed new light on the prehistory of our current ecological challengesandhellip;. Beautifully illustrated and evocatively written, Wasteland: A History is an original, informative, and elegant piece of scholarship that develops strong and surprising connections between aesthetic values and moral debates about land use. Ranging freely between numerous disciplines, Vittoria Di Palma shows how the concept of the wasteland has long and diversely shaped what has now become, for better and for worse, our industrial modernity.andrdquo;andmdash;American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

In an eloquent history of landscape and land use, Vittoria Di Palma takes on the and#8220;anti-picturesqueand#8221;and#8212;how landscapes that elicit fear and disgust have shaped our conceptions of beauty and the sublime.

Vittoria Di Palma is assistant professor in the School of Architecture of the University of Southern California.

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