The Cultural Reconstruction of Places

Summary: The eighteen articles in this book focus on and critically explore several manifestations of the ways in which places assume historical and cultural meaning. Many places we get to know come to us (and we to them) loaded with historical significance, but the ideological and aesthetic construction of the past in relation to the present also often involves concentration on certain places, be they local, native, or forei...gn. Such places - and they can be anything from a city square to a piece of wilderness to a whole country - are constantly reconstructed by cultural reiterations, renovations or contestations. Places are among the keys to our cultural identities, but this means they are also gateways of the imaginary. The authors scholars from Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Iceland, and Britain demonstrate and discuss how important ideas are grounded on physical sites, be they circumscribed by national interests, urban encounters, historical figures, traumatic events, or mythic notions of landscape. A number of articles dwell on Iceland as a place of the utopian imaginary, as fleshed out for instance by William Morris. [read more]