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Dark Eden
The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
Professor Miller examines prominent writers and painters of nineteenth-century America who explored the scenery of swamps, jungles, and other wastelands.
David Miller (Author)
9780521147460, Cambridge University Press
Paperback, published 26 August 2010
350 pages
25.4 x 17.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.61 kg
"...a wide-ranging, generously illustrated cataloguing of the metaphor of the swamp (and marsh and jungle) in American painting, writing and folklore. Miller's attention both to the physical shapes of particular landscapes and to what artists project on to a landscape makes the book a useful extension of work in a Canadian context by Dick Harrison, Robert Thacker and Gaile MacGregor." Canadian Literature
An important though little understood aspect of the response of nineteenth-century Americans to nature is the widespread interest in the scenery of swamps, jungles, and other wastelands. Dark Eden focuses on this developing interest in order to redefine cultural values during a transformative period of American history. Professor Miller shows how for many Americans in the period around the Civil War nature came to be regarded less as a source of high moral insight and more as a sanctuary from an ever more urbanised and technological environment. In the swamps and jungles of the South a whole range of writers and artists found a set of strange and exotic images by which to explore changing social realities of the times and the deep-seated personal pressures that accompanied them.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. The Matrix of Transformation: 1. To the lake of the dismal swamp: Porte Crayon's inward journey
2. The elusive Eden: the mid-Victorian response to the swamp
3. Mid-Victorian cultural values and the amoral landscape: the swamp image in the work of William Gilmore Simms and Harriet Beecher Stowe
Part II. The Phenomenology of Disintegration: 4. Frederic Church in the tropics
5. The penetration of the jungle
6. American nature writing in the mid-Victorian period: from pilgrimage to quest
7. A loss of vision: the cultural inheritance
8. A loss of vision: the challenge of the image
9. Infection and imagination: the swamp and the atmospheric analogy
Part III. The Circuit of Death and Regeneration: 10. Immersion and regeneration: Emerson and Thoreau
8. The identification with desert places: Martin Johnson Heade and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
12. Religion, science, and nature: Sidney Lanier and Lafcadio Hearn
Conclusion: Katherine Anne Porter's Jungle and the Modernist idiom
Appendix
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index.
Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Cultural studies [JFC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]