Overview

Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe’s east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers’ reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets. Studying the eastern European ‘iconosphere’ leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies.

Full Product Details

9781138490857

Table of Contents

Reviews

[The book] thoughtfully traces the shifting meanings of folk dress, or specifically the female 'ethnic body' clothed in folk dress, across three centuries ... [and it] shows how images of maps and bodies worked in tandem as the primary sites of the visual production of knowledge, producing 'Eastern Europe' as an imagined place. ... [The author] gestures very strongly to how LGBTQ (self-)representation can encompass visual strategies of dissent. -- Oxford Art Journal Studying the eastern European 'iconosphere' leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies. --New Book Network Reaching as far back as renaissance renderings of Ptolemy's knowledge of the area, then marked as 'Sarmatia Europea,' the author shows how the region of 'Eastern Europe' changed its borders, meanings, content and how the maps reflected the knowledge, assumptions, but also the ideology of their makers. -- Tokovi Istorije The book is situated at the crossroads of several disciplines in the rapidly changing field of visual studies, and thus can open up exciting new avenues for research. -- ARTMargins The author follows diverse western tropes associated with Europe's East, contextualising them within historical discourses about the region, and setting them against her excellent analyses of images from the margins of visual culture, including cartoons. -- Szum

Author Information

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius teaches in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was Deputy Director of the National Museum in Warsaw.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available