Stephanie O'Rourke

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Stephanie O'Rourke

Stephanie O'RourkeStephanie O'RourkeStephanie O'Rourke
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Picturing landscape in an age of extraction: Europe and its colonial networks, 1780-1850

University of Chicago Press, September 2025

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European artists confronted the emergence of a new, essentially extractive way of thinking about and treating the natural world. It was characterized by large-scale, self-accelerating efforts to quantify, optimize, separate, circulate, and monetize the physical environment across global networks. This book centers the practices and the logic of extraction in a new account of what was at stake in visual representations of the natural world during the first several decades of Europe’s industrial revolution.  It focuses on developments that were taking place primarily within Britain, France, and Germany but that were always embedded within Europe’s colonial networks, particularly in North Africa, Oceania, India, and the Americas. 

table of contents

Introduction
1. The French Landscape and the Colonial Forest
2. Mining Romanticism and the Abyss of Time
3. How to Scale a Volcano
4. Human Resources
Conclusion

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Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism

art, science, and the body in early romanticism

review excerpts

"An exemplary book...[it] presents a capstone vision of how histories of art and science can be told together." Matthew Hunter (McGill)


"O’Rourke debuts as equal parts erudite scholar and exceptional storyteller, which is an all-too-rare gift in academic prose." Nina Amstutz (University of Oregon)


"As her wide reading and close looking show, these artists' attempts to make the body legible hit at every juncture upon instability of the self, invisibility of the causes of action, and other sources of error and indeterminacy in scientific method and Enlightenment efforts to apply it to modern life." (Andrei Pop, University of Chicago)


*Winner, The BARS First Book Prize 2023*

*Short-listed, Kenshur Prize for best book in eighteenth-century studies, 2023*

Table of contents

    Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

1. De Loutherbourg's Mesmeric Effects

2. Fuseli's Physiognomic Impressions

3. Girodet's Electric Shocks

4. Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Cambridge University Press

2021


FORMAT: Hardback

ISBN: 9781316519028


Paperback edition: October 2023

purchase from the publisher
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Amazon UK

so38 at st-andrews dot ac dot uk

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