Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature: Topographies of Skepticism

by Robert E. Abrams

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

Genres: Academic

180 pages, Hardcover

First published December 22, 2003

Reviews

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this short text Abrams explores how ambiguities in "American Renaissance" literature destabilize understandings of landscape, space history, and locating "place-ness." A smart little book with much keen insight, but the density of the academic verbiage make those valuable insights less accessible, and the text was several times hampered by representative metaphors and language that became trite and did not justly, nor adequately, distill the intended meaning, giving a sophisticated, yet shallow impression to material that is actually quite deep and complex in its resonances and implications.