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Oxford Studies in American Literary History

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

Evelev, John (Professor of English, Professor of English, University of Missouri, USA)

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

Oxford Studies in American Literary History

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

Oxford Studies in American Literary History: Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

 

This work challenges dominant narratives of the concerns of nineteenth century literature to show how supposedly minor works of picturesque helped transform the American landscape, and create what we now recognize as the defining spaces of American life.


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Beschrijving Oxford Studies in American Literary History: Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

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.


ISBN
9780192894557
Pagina's
288
Verschenen
Serie
Oxford Studies in American Literary History
NUR
320
Druk
1
Uitvoering
Hardback
Taal
Engels
Uitgever
OUP Oxford

Literaire non-fictie