American Iconology: New Approches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. 344 pages, illustrations; 26 cm. Tight, clean copy. "This overview of the 'sister arts' of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. / David C. Miller is assistant professor of English at Allegheny College." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Peale's mammoth, by Laura Rigal; The Boston elite's resistance to Washington Allston's Elijah in the Desert, by David Bjelajac; On the cultural construction of landscape experience: Contact to 1830, by Kenneth John Myers; Making a picture of the view from Mount Holyoke, by Alan Wallach; The protected witness: Cole, Cooper, and the tourist's view of the Italian landscape, by Brigitte Bailey; The mechanisms of the market and the invention of western regionalism: The example of George Caleb Bingham, by Angela Miller; Lilly Martin Spencer's domestic genre painting in antebellum America, by David Lubin; Words, monuments, beholders: The visual arts in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, by Robert H. Byer; The iconology of wrecked or stranded boats in mid to late nineteenth-century American culture, by David C. Miller; The price of beauty: Art, commerce, and the late nineteenth-century American studio interior, by Sarah Burns; Mary Cassatt and the maternal body, by Harriet Scott Chessman; A pragmatic mode of seeing: James, Howells, and the politics of vision, by Emily Fourmy Cutrer.. Paperback. Fine. 4to.