PublishedReaktion Books, May 2018 |
ISBN9781780239323 |
FormatHardcover, 184 pages |
Dimensions21cm × 14.8cm |
Mirages have long astonished travellers and beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Chinese and Japanese poetry and images depicted mirages as the exhalations of clam-monsters. Indian sources related them to the `thirst of gazelles', a metaphor for the futility of desire.
From the late eighteenth century to the present, mirages became a symbol of `Oriental despotism', a malign, but also enchanted, emblem. But the mirage motif is rarely simply condemnatory. More commonly it conveys a sense of escape, of fascination, of a desire to be deceived.
The Waterless Sea is the first book devoted to the theories and history of mirages. Christopher Pinney navigates a sinuous pathway through a mysterious and evanescent terrain, showing how mirages have impacted politics, culture, science, and religion, and how we can continue to learn from their sublimity.
