Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 289
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780192894557
ISBN-13 : 0192894552
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 by : John Evelev

Download or read book Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 written by John Evelev and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, mid-century bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promoted in a variety of popular literary genres, all focused on landscape description and all of which trained readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed minor or have been forgotten by our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include everyone from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe), to major authors of the period now less familiar (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller), to those now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.


Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 Related Books

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874
Language: en
Pages: 289
Authors: John Evelev
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appr
Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874
Language: en
Pages: 289
Authors: John Evelev
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-05-04 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appr
Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics
Language: en
Pages: 225
Authors: Michael Boyden
Categories: Technology & Engineering
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-11-07 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The biggest challenge of the twenty-first century is to bring the effects of public life into relation with the intractable problem of global atmospheric change
Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature
Language: en
Pages: 209
Authors: David Anthony
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2023-08 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum literature. This stereotyped character appears primarily in t
Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878
Language: en
Pages: 239
Authors: Evan Robert Neely
Categories: Art
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-05-01 - Publisher: Taylor & Francis

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878 is an interdisciplinary work analyzing the historical origins of a dominant c