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The American Landscape, Hardback Book

The American Landscape Hardback

Edited by Graham Clarke

Hardback

Out of stock

Description

The first set of volumes in the "Literary and Cultural Movements: Sources and Documents" series.

Each title in the series concentrates on a significant cultural and literary area or period and offers the student an extensive range of primary source and documentary material which together represents a significant research resource. The material presented consists of original source material from the period or subject and includes prefaces, letters, essays and critical texts from the period as well as related material - especially complete texts.

In addition, each set includes a substantial introductory essay placing the material in context; a chronology of the period or movement noting texts and figures as well as relating material to relevant references elsewhere; a bibliography of the texts associated with the period or movement; an extensive critical bibliography; and biographical notes on significant figures and editorial notes on the source material. This three volume set brings together a wide range of often disparate material, much of which is difficult to locate. Volume one covers the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries which saw an increasing awareness of and interest in the land and in many ways parallels the growing concern with the landscape that was developing in Europe at the time.

As travellers and explorers began to open up the continent, moving West and South, the text conveys the sense of variety and magnitude as well as difference which was later to underpin the differing cultural perspectives. Volume two opens with a section on transcendentalism, followed by the developement of the "picturesque" (put into wider perspective by the section on American landscape painting) and the growing debate represented by three writers: James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. While volume two reflects literary and aesthetic as well as philosophical and poetic concerns, volume three reflects a wider response and suggests alternative vocabularies as much as alternative values to the concerns of writer, poet and artist.

This volume, in essence, offers a chronological "reading" of the 19th century in relation to the frontier, the West, and the major expeditions beyond the line of settlement.

Thus the selections reflect the variety of response: explorer, surveyor, philosopher, artist, writer, settler, pioneer, geologist, historian, "Brahmin" and farmer are given equal status, and equal significance as to how the land is "read".

The final examples are pointers to larger debates and look towards a 20th-century concern with the American landscape as the culture moves increasingly towards its urban alternative.

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£525.00

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