Images Of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 To The Present
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
What does it mean when a civilization turns to images of catastrophe, ruin, and upheaval to articulate its deepest anxieties? Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present by George P. Landow answers this question with remarkable scholarly authority, charting the recurring visual and literary motifs of disaster across more than two centuries of Western culture. Landow examines how writers, artists, and thinkers from the Romantic era through the modern age have drawn upon a shared iconographic vocabulary — crumbling cities, apocalyptic floods, collapsing towers — to give form to political, spiritual, and existential crises. The work presents a sweeping, cross-disciplinary argument that these images are not mere decoration but a coherent symbolic language through which cultures process fear and transformation. Landow's methodology is a masterful fusion of art history, literary criticism, and cultural theory, illustrating how visual conventions migrate between painting and literature, shaping and being shaped by the social upheavals of their time. His writing is precise yet evocative, demanding intellectual engagement while rewarding the reader with fresh insight into canonical and overlooked works alike. For scholars of Victorian literature, Romanticism, or the history of ideas, this study is an indispensable guide to the hidden grammar of cultural catastrophe — leaving the reader to wonder what the crises of our own era will look like to the scholars of the future.
Author: George P. Landow
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
What does it mean when a civilization turns to images of catastrophe, ruin, and upheaval to articulate its deepest anxieties? Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present by George P. Landow answers this question with remarkable scholarly authority, charting the recurring visual and literary motifs of disaster across more than two centuries of Western culture. Landow examines how writers, artists, and thinkers from the Romantic era through the modern age have drawn upon a shared iconographic vocabulary — crumbling cities, apocalyptic floods, collapsing towers — to give form to political, spiritual, and existential crises. The work presents a sweeping, cross-disciplinary argument that these images are not mere decoration but a coherent symbolic language through which cultures process fear and transformation. Landow's methodology is a masterful fusion of art history, literary criticism, and cultural theory, illustrating how visual conventions migrate between painting and literature, shaping and being shaped by the social upheavals of their time. His writing is precise yet evocative, demanding intellectual engagement while rewarding the reader with fresh insight into canonical and overlooked works alike. For scholars of Victorian literature, Romanticism, or the history of ideas, this study is an indispensable guide to the hidden grammar of cultural catastrophe — leaving the reader to wonder what the crises of our own era will look like to the scholars of the future.