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.

Author: John Evelev
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 07/06/2021
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780192894557

About the Author

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

John Evelev is Professor of English at the University of Missouri.