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Professor Miller examines prominent writers and painters of nineteenth-century America who explored the scenery of swamps, jungles, and other wastelands.
List of contents
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.
Summary
Professor Miller examines prominent writers and painters of nineteenth-century America who explored the scenery of swamps, jungles, and other wastelands. Through this examination, Miller discusses the changing social realities around the Civil War and the deep-seated personal pressures that the urbanised and technological environment had on these artists.
