The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination.

Abstract

From reviews of first edition: Scrupulous yet enjoyable literary criticism, and most enjoyable because it is so surefooted and so strongly practical: It helps you think about what you read about Florida.--St. Petersburg Times Suggests how our national imagination has seized upon one aspect of South and found therein a richness that it can continue to mine.--Modern Fiction Studies Highly recommended.--Choice For Ernest Hemingway, semitropics of Key West offered the last wild country; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings recaptured a sense of home at Cross Creek that she had experienced since childhood; Henry James vacationed in Palm Beach and St. Augustine and was torn between the velvet air, colour of sea, 'royal' palms clustered here and there and his repugnance for masses who transformed great hotels into Vanity Fair in full blast. They--along with others--came to Florida, and they expressed their experiences in poems, stories, and nonfiction. Beginning with premise that Florida has been perceived in American imagination as not merely a geographic region but an image, a garden, Eden-like, Rowe analyzes representative works of writers from early national period to present who were attracted to state and who found it without parallel in rest of country. Arranged in roughly chronological order, book opens with a chapter on Ralph Waldo Emerson's soothing winter in St. Augustine in 1827 and moves on to accounts by Washington Irving of Seminole Indian wars and by Harriet Beecher Stowe on leisurely life-style she enjoyed in Florida after Civil War. It concludes with a chapter on Wallace Stevens, who found state an enchantress--erotic, willful, and seductive. Though contour of imaginative landscape gives way at times to a view of Florida as a haven for invalids and a playground for rich, Rowe discovers that a singular image of state persists and writes that the Land of Opportunity has been tempered and diverted by languors of a tropical climate washed by Gulf Stream and balm of an always warm sun. Anne E. Rowe is professor of English at Florida State University and author of The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in South, 1865-1910.