Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.

Abstract

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.