The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism

The Geographic Imaginationtraces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought, locating it in the decades around 1800, the same period in which the modern concept of history came into being. It is well known that this period represents an extraordinary intellectual threshold, a time when European society invented new conceptual strategies for making sense of itself. Tang's book brings to light, for the first time, geography as one of the most important of these conceptual strategies. His inquiry initially revolves around the rise of geographic science, as it is in this science that the geographic imagination crystallizes. The second part of the book offers a systematic study of the key spatial categories of the modern geographic imagination, including orientation, cultural landscape, and geohistory. In reconstructing the emergence of geographic science and the modern semantics of geographic space, this book approaches the literary and philosophical discourses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from a radically new perspective.

Chenxi Tang taught German literature at the University of Chicago before joining the Department of German at the University of California at Berkeley in 2007. He has received a number of awards, including the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship.