This book traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought in the decades around 1800. This period represents an extraordinary intellectual threshold, a time when European society invented new conceptual strategies for making sense of itself. The book brings to light geography as one of the most important of these conceptual strategies. The book's inquiry revolves, first of all, around the rise of geographic science, as it is in this science that the geographic imagination crystallizes. The second part of the book offers a systematic study of the key spatial categories ... More

This book traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought in the decades around 1800. This period represents an extraordinary intellectual threshold, a time when European society invented new conceptual strategies for making sense of itself. The book brings to light geography as one of the most important of these conceptual strategies. The book's inquiry revolves, first of all, around the rise of geographic science, as it is in this science that the geographic imagination crystallizes. The second part of the book offers a systematic study of the key spatial categories of the modern geographic imagination, including orientation, cultural landscape, and geohistory. In reconstructing the emergence of geographic science and the modern semantics of geographic space, the book approaches the literary and philosophical discourses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from a new perspective.