Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874

Abstract

AbstractThis book examines 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 world that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, midcentury 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 promulgated in a variety of popular literary genres, all of which focused on landscape description and inculcated readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed “minor” or have even been forgotten in our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include those from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe) to major authors of the period who are now less familiar to us (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller) to those who are 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.