Extreme Europe (TOPOGRAPHICS) - Softcover

Barber, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861890915 ISBN 13: 9781861890917

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2001

Synopsis

This work explores the urban extremes of Europe in their cultural, physical, geographical and mythical dimensions. "Extreme Europe" considers the history and visual culture of Europe in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Barber sets out to explore and define Europe's political and conceptual edges, first making a circuit eastwards through Albania to Turkey, then south- and westwards along the Mediterranean coast, with stops in Crete and Marseilles. The book then moves through several decades of history as they can be read in both the surviving and rejuvenated fabrics of Berlin, and finally through the frayed, disaffected and multicultural landscapes of Paris' outer suburbs. The author's purpose in scanning Europe's geographical and psychological extremes is to examine its cities and their surrounding areas as sites of a conflict between the mesmerizing, all-engulfing power of the visual media and the tenacious, barely surviving traces of traditional culture. The book maintains that the "breakdown zones" at Europe's urban edges are the areas where its most oppositional and vital images and languages are being created today.

About this title

Review:

'provocative and illuminating ... a useful and rigorous guide to the byways and border zones of this hugely diverse landmass.' -- UNTOLD magazine - July 2001

About the Author:

Stephen Barber has been hailed by the Independent on Sunday as "a cultural historian of real distinction ... [who] gives us superb, rich, unjudgemental portraits of multi-stranded societies..." He is the author of Fragments of the European City (Reaktion, 1995) and Edmund White: The Burning World (1999).

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1861890915
• ISBN 13: 9781861890917
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128