Overview

Extreme Europe explores the urban extremes of Europe in their cultural, physical, geographical and mythical dimensions, considering the history and visual culture of Europe in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Barber’s purpose is to examine Europe’s cities and their surrounding areas as sites of a conflict between the mesmerising, all-engulfing power of visual media and the barely surviving traces of tenacious historical culture; his premise is that the ‘breakdown zones’ at Europe’s urban edges are the sites where its oppositional and most vital images and languages are being created today. Barber sets out to explore and define Europe’s political and conceptual edges, first making a circuit eastwards through Albania to Turkey, then south – and westwards along the Mediterranean coast, with stops in Crete and Marseille. The book’s two other sections move, first, through several decades of history as they can be read in both the surviving and the transformed fabrics of Berlin, and, finally, through the frayed, disaffected multicultural landscapes of Paris’ outer suburbs.

Full Product Details

9781861890917

Table of Contents

Reviews

[Barbers] book is a rich account of a fracturing continent, re-forming endlessly in the minds of its inhabitants. * <i>The Independent on Sunday</i> * Barbers account of a journey around the margins of Euroland is as provocative and illuminating as his previous incursions into the continental mindset . . . a fine eye for the telling detail and a fluid prose style . . . Barbers a useful and rigorous guide to the byways and border-zones of this hugely diverse landmass. * <i>Untold</i> * In Stephen Barbers Extreme Europe, we have a writer who carries the city within him. * <i>Literary Review of Canada</i> *

Author Information

Stephen Barber is Professor in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, Surrey. His books include Fragments of the European City (Reaktion, 1995), Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (Reaktion, 2000), Tokyo Vertigo (2001), Extreme Europe (2001), The Art of Destruction: The Films of the Vienna Action Group (2004), Jean Genet (Reaktion, 2005), Abandoned Images: Film and Film's End (2011) and Performance Projections (2014). The Times has praised his work as ‘brilliant and profound’.

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