Overview
"Texas-shaped ashtrays, belt buckles, earrings, kitchen utensils--""Texas kitsch""--fill gift shops alongside highways and in airports. The Lone Star State's unmistakable shape is appropriated by advertisers to hawk everything from beans to automobiles inside Texas' borders and beyond. As a billboard-sized neon sign glowing atop a popular honkey-tonk, the Texas map illuminates the Fort Worth night sky, attracting tourists in search of a good time--and a share of the Texas experience. Over the years America's most recognizable state outline has become one of its most potent symbols, a metaphor for Texas popular culture. In the last decade, the private, commercial, and official use of the Texas map as cultural symbol has boomed. Richard V. Francaviglia identifies this current trend as ""Tex-map mania,"" and contends that the Texas map as icon integrates geography with history--and gives shape to a mythic landscape and to abstracted notions of what Texas is and who Texans are. Written in a lively style that engages both the scholar and the general reader in a discussion of the power of symbol and the meaning and significance of a shared aesthetic, The Shape of Texas is at the crossroads of cartography and popular culture. Francaviglia uses more than one hundred illustrations in offering a provocative visual and written account of this important, yet much neglected, aspect of Texas history and the dynamics of a still emerging Texas identity."
Full Product Details
Author: Richard Francaviglia
Publisher: Texas A & M University Press
Imprint: Texas A & M University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.50cm
, Height: 1.60cm
, Length: 24.10cm
Weight: 0.454kg
ISBN: 9780890966648
ISBN 10: 0890966648
Pages: 118
Publication Date: 31 January 1996
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Undergraduate
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
. . . the first serious attempt to examine the process by which a map becomes a popular symbol. Although its focus may be liminted in that it concentrates on a single cartograhic icon, the methodology will surely be applicable to the study of any popular map. . . . Francaviglia has just legitimized popular cartography as a thoughtful academic pursuit. --Jeffrey S. Murray, Association of Canadian Map Libraries -- Jeffrey S. Murray, Association of Canadian Map Libraries
Author Information
RICHARD FRANCAVIGLIA is director of the Center for Southwestern Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. His book The Shape of Texas was published by Texas A&M University Press. JERRY RODNITZKY is the author of Jazz-Age Boomtown, published by Texas A&M University Press. Both are professors of history at the University of Texas at Arlington.
