Then, as the play begins, the perspective shifts and reader becomes the real audience to this unique performance.

    The result is a remarkable synthesis, which reflects well the subtleties of experience and yet avoids the pitfalls of arbitrary classification and facile generalization. For these reasons, and for its general tone and erudition and humanism, this book will surely be one that will endure when the current flurry of academic interest in environmental experience abates.” Canadian Geographer

    

    The papers are divided into three sections that examine Chinese cities in the context of history, spacial structure, and urban social structure. This digital edition was derived from ACLS Humanities E-Book's (http: //www.humanitiesebook.org) online version of the same title.

    The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure.Like all of Robert Harbison's works, Eccentric Spaces is a hybrid, informed by the author's interests in art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape, geography, history, and philosophy. The subject is the human imagination--and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure.Palaces and haunted houses, Victorian parlors, Renaissance sculpture gardens, factories, hill-towns, ruins, cities, even novels and paintings constructed around such environments--these are the spaces over which the author broods. Brilliantly learned, deliberately remote in form from conventional scholarship, Eccentric Spaces is a magical book, an intellectual adventure, a celebration.Since its original publication in 1977, Eccentric Spaces has had a devoted readership. Now it is available to be discovered by a new generation of readers.

    

    18 maps. Index. 1996 (1977). Esther Swift's immensely popular history of every conceivable place-name in Vermont has served well an entire generation of researchers. Not only is the history of each place-name given, Mrs. Swift gives you a capsule history of the town, village or settlement involved. Mrs. Swift demonstrates a clear and incisive grasp of the geography and history of Vermont; the infringing New Hampshire and New York patents are covered in separate appendices; and in sum this book is well-researched, well written, and well received. Another must-have tool for Vermont.

    Exploring the "morphogenesis" of the city in Western civilization, this new edition contains updated material, a new introduction, and additional illustrations.