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Zone Of The Marvellous : In Search Of The Antipodes
Paperback Edition: 1
Australia and New Zealand were imagined for thousands of years before they became real. From Plato’s Atlantis to Dante’s Mount Purgatory, from Sinbad the Sailor to Abel Tasman, travellers, writers, map-makers and charlatans have dreamt of an other world on the opposite side of the
Northern Hemisphere. Martin Edmond’s 4000-year history of the antipodes in the Western imagination has an extraordinary intellectual breadth and imaginative reach. Beginning with the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Edmond reveals the allure of an antipodal world from the earliest Western writing. While Ptolemy proposed a Great South Land to balance the weight of the Northern Hemisphere continents on his maps, and Phoenician, Greek and Roman sailors began voyaging down the African coast, thinkers from Dante to Defoe were imagining paradise (or its opposite) at the bottom of the South Seas. Would you find pearls or purgatory or lost tribes in the antipodes? And whose fantastic tales should you trust? Even though the South Seas were discovered and settled over the last few centuries, Edmond finds that the tradition of the marvellous antipodes has exerted a powerful hold over artists and writers such as Sidney Nolan, Shane Cotton, James K Baxter and Janet Frame.
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Featured in the 14 September 2009 New Zealand newsletter.
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Publisher : Auckland University Press
Publication date : 2009-09-01
Subjects: Non-fiction, Published in New Zealand, Humanities, New Zealand, History, NZ History