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

2021-05-04 Literary Criticism
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Release : 2021-05-04
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 326/5 ( reviews)

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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. This book was released on 2021-05-04. 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

2021 American literature
Download Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 2021
Genre : American literature
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 499/5 ( reviews)

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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. This book was released on 2021. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

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

2021 Literary Criticism
Download Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 2021
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 552/5 ( reviews)

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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. This book was released on 2021. 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.

Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics

2022-11-07 Technology & Engineering
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Release : 2022-11-07
Genre : Technology & Engineering
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 448/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics by : Michael Boyden

Download or read book Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics written by Michael Boyden. This book was released on 2022-11-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics explains how we came to think of the climate as something abstract and remote rather than a force that actively shapes our existence. The book argues that this separation between climate and sensibility predates the rise of modern climatology and has deep roots in the era of colonial expansion, when the American tropics were transformed into the economic supplier for Euro-American empires. The book shows how the writings of American travellers in the Caribbean registered and pushed forward this new understanding of the climate in a pivotal period in modern history, roughly between 1770 and 1860, which was fraught with debates over slavery, environmental destruction, and colonialism. Offering novel readings of authors including J. Hector St. John de Crevecœur, Leonora Sansay, William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James McCune Smith in light of their engagements with the American tropics, this book shows that these authors drew on a climatic epistemology that fused science and sentiment in ways that citizen science is aspiring to do today. By suggesting a new genealogy of modern climate thinking, Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics thus highlights the urgency of revisiting received ideas of tropicality deeply ingrained in American culture that continue to inform current debates on climate debt and justice.

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature

2023-08 Literary Criticism
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Release : 2023-08
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 730/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by : David Anthony

Download or read book Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature written by David Anthony. This book was released on 2023-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum literature. This stereotyped character appears primarily in the pulpy sensation fiction of popular writers like George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and others. But this figure also plays an important role in the sometimes sensational work of canonical writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Whatever the medium, this character, always overdetermined, does consistent cultural work. This book contends that, as the figure who embodies money and capitalism in the antebellum imagination, the sensational Jew is the character who most fully represents a felt anxiety about the increasingly unstable nature of a range of social categories in the antebellum US, and the sense of loss and self-hatred so often lurking in the background of modern Gentile identity. Each chapter examines a different form of sensationalism (urban gothic; sentimental city mysteries; anti-Tom plantation narratives; etc.), and a different set of anxieties (threats to class status; collapsing regional identity; the uncertain status of Whiteness and other racial categories; etc.). Throughout, the sensational Jew acts both as a figure of proteophobia (fear of disorder and ambivalence), and as the figure who embodies in uncanny form a more fulfilling and socially coherent form of identity that predates the modern liberal selfhood of the post-Enlightenment world. The sensational Jew is therefore a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary antisemitism in the US.

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