Binding: Hardcover
Description: 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.
Title: Picturesque Literature And The Transformation Of The American Landscape 1835 - 1874
Author(s): Evelev John (Professor Of English Associate Professor Of English University Of Missouri Usa)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Barcode: 9780192894557
Pages: 288 Pages
Publication Date: 7/6/2021
Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Category: History Of The Americas