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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Hawkins, Stephanie L., 1971-

Title American iconographic : National Geographic, global culture, and the visual imagination / Stephanie L. Hawkins.

Publication Info. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (x, 252 pages) : illustrations.
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Series Cultural frames, framing culture
Cultural frames, framing culture.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-244) and index.
Contents National geographic : the icon and its readers -- Training the "I" to see : progressive education, visual literacy, and National Geographic membership -- Savage visions : ethnography, photography, and local-color fiction in National geographic -- Fracturing the global family romance : National geographic, World War I, and fascism -- Jungle housekeeping : globalization, domesticity, and performing the "primitive" in National geographic -- National Geographic's romance in ruins : from the catastrophic sublime to camp.
Summary In an era before affordable travel, National Geographic not only served as the first glimpse of countless other worlds for its readers, but it helped them confront sweeping historical change. There was a time when its cover, with the unmistakable yellow frame, seemed to be on every coffee table, in every waiting room. In American Iconographic, Stephanie L. Hawkins traces National Geographic's rise to cultural prominence, from its first publication of nude photographs in 1896 to the 1950s, when the magazine's trademark visual and textual motifs found their way into cartoon caricature, popular novels, and film trading on the "romance" of the magazine's distinctive visual fare. Drawing on the National Geographic Society's archive of readers' letters and its founders' correspondence, Hawkins reveals how the magazine's participation in the "culture industry" was not so straightforward as scholars have assumed. Letters from the magazine's earliest readers offer an important intervention in this narrative of passive spectatorship, revealing how readers resisted and revised National Geographic's authority. Its photographs and articles celebrated American self-reliance and imperialist expansion abroad, but its readers were highly aware of these representational strategies, and alert to inconsistencies between the magazine's editorial vision and its photographs and text. Hawkins also illustrates how the magazine actually encouraged readers to question Western values and identify with those beyond the nation's borders. Chapters devoted to the magazine's practice of photographing its photographers on assignment and to its genre of husband-wife adventurers reveal a more enlightened National Geographic invested in a cosmopolitan vision of a global human family.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject National geographic -- History.
National geographic.
History.
National geographic -- Social aspects.
Social aspects.
National geographic -- History -- Social aspects.
National geographic.
Discoveries in geography -- Press coverage.
Discoveries in geography -- Press coverage.
Photography in ethnology.
Photography in ethnology.
Genre/Form Electronic books.
History.
Other Form: Print version: Hawkins, Stephanie L., 1971- American iconographic. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2010 9780813929651 (DLC) 2009041710 (OCoLC)461630762
ISBN 9780813929750 (electronic book)
081392975X (electronic book)
9780813929651
9780813929668
0813929652
0813929660