Wild Things

Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination assembles eleven original essays on the cultural and social dimensions of environmental history. They address a global cornucopia of social and ecological systems, from Africa to Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and their temporal range extends from the 1830s into the twenty-first century.The loci of the studies included here represent both the microcosmic - underwater laboratory, zoo, film studio; and broad canvases - the German forest, the Rocky Mountains, the islands of Haiti and Madagascar. The imaginative (and actual) construction of landscapes and the appropriation of Nature - through image-fashioning, curating museum and zoo collections, making 'friends', 'enemies' and mythical symbols from animals - are recurring subjects. Canonical environmental history themes, from colonialism to conservation, are re-inflected by discourses including gender studies, Romanticism, politics and technology. This volume represents an excitingly diverse collection of studies of how humans, in imagination and deed, act on and are acted on by 'wild things'.