Water in social imagination : : from technological optimism to contemporary environmentalism / / edited by Jane Costlow, Yrjo Haila, Arja Rosenholm.

• Superior document: Nature, Culture and Literature ; v.12
• TeilnehmendeR: Costlow, Jane T. 1955-; Haila, Yrjo.; Rosenholm, Arja.
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2017.
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Series: Nature, Culture and Literature 12.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 pages) :; color illustrations.

Water in Social Imagination considers how human communities have known, imagined and shaped water – and how water has shaped both material culture and the imagination. Essays from diverse perspectives offer histories of water at different scales – from community water wells and sacred springs to Siberian rivers and the regulated space of the Baltic Sea. From early modernization through Soviet style technological optimism to contemporary environmentalism, water’s ideological uses are multiple. With sustained attention not just to state policy and the technologies of high modernity, but to creative resistance to utilitarian imaginations, these essays insist on fluidities of meaning, ambiguities that derive both from water’s physical mutability and from its dual nature as life necessity and agent of destruction.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Jane Costlow , Yrjö Haila and Arja Rosenholm -- Knowing Water: An Introduction / Jane Costlow , Yrjö Haila and Arja Rosenholm -- Liquid Scale: Trans-Scalar Thinking and the Perception of Water / Scott Slovic -- Water and Urban Space in Late Medieval Stockholm / Maija Ojala -- The Many Roles of the Dynamic Danube in Early Modern Europe: Representations in Contemporary Sources / Verena Winiwarter -- Water, Space, and Desire in Soviet Fiction: The Case of Konstantin Paustovsky / Arja Rosenholm -- The Interplay of Water, Home, and Narration in Überfahrt by Anna Seghers / Withold Bonner -- The River in Thaw-era Soviet Popular Song (1954–1970): The Formation of an Amicable Space / Maria Litovskaya -- “The Sovereign of the River and the Sovereign of All Nature—in the Same Trap” / Mika Perkiömäki -- The Pollution of the Baltic Sea: A Mirror Image of Modernization / Nina Tynkkynen -- The Deep Waters of Literary Theme. Nature, Narrative, and Identity in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna / Markku Lehtimäki -- A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea. Water Myths and Risk Society in Veronica Pimenoff’s Risteilijät / Toni Lahtinen -- “It was only a tiny spring”: Veneration, Value and Local Springs in Contemporary Russia / Jane Costlow -- Securing Water: Ambiguities of Control vs. Coexistence / Yrjö Haila -- Index / Jane Costlow , Yrjö Haila and Arja Rosenholm.