Views of American Landscapes

This book is about the ways American and British writers, painters and photographers have represented the American environment.

Mick Gidley (Edited by), Robert Lawson-Peebles (Edited by)

9780521033930, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 February 2007

252 pages, 33 b/w illus.
23.4 x 15.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.361 kg

This book is about the ways American and British writers, painters and photographers have represented the American environment. It brings together essays by American, British and European scholars which consider the one hundred and twenty years following the Revolution and examine the preconceptions, ideologies, rhetorical and aesthetic conventions that shaped attitudes to the North American continent. While ranging widely, the essayists focus on such figures as Jefferson, Crevecoeur, John Neal, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, Fanny Kemble, Dickens, Hawthorne, Clarence King and Edward Curtis. Amongst the places featured in the discussions are the Niagara Falls, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Virginia's Natural Bridge, Mount Ktaadn and a Broadway omnibus. The book contains numerous illustrations, including early photographs of the western United States, and will be of interest to specialists and students of American literature, history and culture.

List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Foreword Leo Marx
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles
Part I. Prospects: 2. 'Gilded backgrounds': reflections on the perception of space and landscape in America Clive Bush
3. The impermanent sublime: nature, photography and the Petrarchan tradition Olaf Hansen
4. American landscape and the figure of anticipation: paradox and recourse Stephen Fender
5. Trails of topographic notions: expeditionary photography in the American West Philip Stokes
Part II. Anglo-American Perspectives: 6. The absent landscape of America's eighteenth century Robert Clark
7. Ecriture and landscape: British writing on post-revolutionary America Christopher Mulvey
8. Dickens goes west Robert Lawson-Peebles
Part III. American Illustrations: 9. The old world and the new in the national landscapes of John Neal Francesca Orestano
10. Landscape painting and the domestic typology of post-revolutionary America Graham Clarke
11. Winter landscape in the early Republic: survival and sentimentality Bernard Mergen
12. The dark view of things: the isolated figure in the American landscapes of Cole and Bryant Allen J. Koppenhaver
13. The figure of the Indian in photographic landscapes Mick Gidley
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]