American Writers and the Picturesque Tour

American Writers and the Picturesque Tour PDF Author: Beth L. Lueck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135813590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Explores a beloved genre Even before the age of the Romantics, travel literature was a favorite genre of English and American writers and readers. After the War of 1812, Americans' passion for scenic beauty inspired them to take the picturesque tour of America as well as going to Europe for the requisite Grand Tour. The written American version of the popular British tour in various guidebooks helped shape the literature of the new nation as nearly every major writer of the first half of the 19th century contributed to it from Poe, who provided several comic pieces, and Irving to Thoreau, for whom the tour symbolized moral and spiritual growth, and Margaret Fuller. Offers new perspectives American writers adapted the picturesque to express their nationalistic sentiments; picturesque discourse offered a flexible series of conventions that enable writers to celebrate the places, people, and legends that set America apart. This volume demonstrates the vital role of this genre in the formation of national literary taste and national culture and offers fresh and exciting perspectives on the topic. Includes index. Also includes maps.

American Writers and the Picturesque Tour

American Writers and the Picturesque Tour PDF Author: Beth L. Lueck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135813590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores a beloved genre Even before the age of the Romantics, travel literature was a favorite genre of English and American writers and readers. After the War of 1812, Americans' passion for scenic beauty inspired them to take the picturesque tour of America as well as going to Europe for the requisite Grand Tour. The written American version of the popular British tour in various guidebooks helped shape the literature of the new nation as nearly every major writer of the first half of the 19th century contributed to it from Poe, who provided several comic pieces, and Irving to Thoreau, for whom the tour symbolized moral and spiritual growth, and Margaret Fuller. Offers new perspectives American writers adapted the picturesque to express their nationalistic sentiments; picturesque discourse offered a flexible series of conventions that enable writers to celebrate the places, people, and legends that set America apart. This volume demonstrates the vital role of this genre in the formation of national literary taste and national culture and offers fresh and exciting perspectives on the topic. Includes index. Also includes maps.

Picturesque America

Picturesque America PDF Author: William Cullen Bryant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Québec (Province)
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description


A Companion to American Literature

A Companion to American Literature PDF Author: Susan Belasco
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119653355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1859

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Book Description
A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.

The American Elsewhere

The American Elsewhere PDF Author: Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700624783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
As important cultural icons of the early nineteenth-century United States, adventurers energized the mythologies of the West and contributed to the justifications of territorial conquest. They told stories of exhilarating perils, boundless landscapes, and erotic encounters that elevated their chauvinism, avarice, and violence into forms of nobility. As self-proclaimed avatars of American exceptionalism, Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. suggests in The American Elsewhere, adventurers transformed westward expansion into a project of romantic nationalism. A study of US expansionism from 1815–1848, The American Elsewhere delves into the “adventurelogues” of the era to reveal the emotional world of men who sought escape from the anonymity of the urban East and pressures of the Market Revolution. As volunteers, trappers, traders, or curiosity seekers, they stepped into “elsewheres,” distant and dangerous. With their words and art, they entered these unfamiliar realms that had fostered caution and apprehension, and they reimagined them as regions that awakened romantic and reckless optimism. In doing so, Bryan shows, adventurers created the figure of the remarkable American male that generated a wide appeal and encouraged a personal investment in nationhood among their audiences. Bryan provides a thorough reading of a wide variety of sources—including correspondence, travel accounts, fiction, poetry, artwork, and material culture—and finds that adventurers told stories and shaped images that beguiled a generation of Americans into believing in their own exceptionality and in their destiny to conquer the continent.

Susan Fenimore Cooper

Susan Fenimore Cooper PDF Author: Rochelle Johnson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820323268
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Collected here are detailed and diverse essays, some that examine Rural Hours, Susan Fenimore Cooper's most famous work, and others that help establish Cooper as a major practitioner and theorist of American nature writing and as a socially engaged artist in many other genres. These essays discuss Cooper's uses and manipulations of various literary conventions, such as the picturesque, the literary village sketch, and domestic fiction, and illuminate her positions on conservation, religion, and woman's place in society. The engaging collection is divided into four sections. The first features essays examining Cooper's work in light of her relationship with her famous literary father, James Fenimore Cooper, and their devotion to and cultivation of each other's careers. The second focuses on Cooper's fascination with landscape and its relation to her environmental philosophies. Rural Hours is the subject of the third section, which presents new readings on its subtly crafted authorial stance, its two complementary conceptions of time, and its re-valuation of rural and scientific ways of knowing. The collection concludes with four works whose insights into Cooper's views on gender, domesticity, and environmental philosophy grow out of comparisons with several contemporary women writers. These remarkable essays by both established and emerging scholars of nineteenth-century literature present new findings and insights into a writer who is being reintroduced to the fields of eco-criticism and American literature.

A Historical Guide to Henry James

A Historical Guide to Henry James PDF Author: John Carlos Rowe
Publisher:
ISBN: 019512135X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
An excellent primer to the work and milieu of Henry James, this collection of essays highlights the historical and cultural issues that influenced the great novelist.

William Clark's World

William Clark's World PDF Author: Peter J. Kastor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300139012
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
By examining the life and career of William Clark, this book explores how the North American West entered the American imagination. Clark was among the most important western officials of his generation, and he worked to represent the West during a period of tremendous uncertainty and change. Without ever calling himself a writer or an artist, Clark nonetheless drew maps, helped to produce books, drafted lengthy reports, surveyed the landscape, and wrote numerous journals that made sense of the West and its future for Americans who were fascinated by the region's potential but also fearful of its dangers. William Clark's World situates the descriptive words and pictures created by Clark and his contemporaries at the center of a discussion of western history and cultural development. The book casts new light on the familiar narrative of manifest destiny and on the nation's view of the West in the early nineteenth century. --Book Jacket.

The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym PDF Author: Ronald C. Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134828667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: A Dialogue with Unreason traces the complex, scattered criticism of Poe's most anomalous work, as it has steadily grown in prominence to a central position in the study of Poe and American literature. The winding route the criticism of Pym has charted, as convoluted as the narrative itself, has been a history of disagreement at almost every level at which critics and scholars read texts--including the nature and genre of the work, the seriousness or levity of the author's intent, and its stature as a work of genius, hackwork, or something in between. The unique set of thematic and narrative problems the work poses has eluded every hermeneutic structure brought against it so far, consistently undermining the very reading strategies it seems to invite. The only comprehensive critical history and bibliography of Pym, this study fills a large hole Poe scholars have long felt, as it analyzes the ways in which critics and critical camps have attempted to confront, rationalize, contain, or evade its novel and disturbing features. In the process, the criticism is correlated with the popular reception and the international response. Because literary history has entangled no author with his work more than Poe, ultimately this book is as much a study of Poe as of Pym. At every point, therefore, this study embeds the critical response to Pym in the history of Poe studies in general, as well as in the larger context of American literary theory and history. Includes bibliography and index.

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller PDF Author: Charles Capper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199756872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In Volume II, Charles Capper illuminates Fuller's "public years," focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller's dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation's culture and politics. Capper also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller's friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.

Imagining Italians

Imagining Italians PDF Author: Joseph P. Cosco
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791486621
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Integrating history, literary criticism, and cultural studies, Imagining Italians vividly tells the story of two voyages across the Atlantic: America's cultural pilgrimage to Italy and the Italian "racial odyssey" in America. It examines how American representations of Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans engaged with national debates over immigration, race, and national identity during the period 1880–1910. Joseph P. Cosco offers a close analysis of selected works by immigrant journalists Jacob Riis and Edward Steiner and American iconographic writers Henry James and Mark Twain. Exploring their Italian depictions in journalism, photos, travel narratives, and fiction, he rediscovers the forgotten Edward Steiner and offers fresh readings of Riis's reform efforts and photography, James's The Golden Bowl and The American Scene, and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.