Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on The Picturesque Vision First edition de Nevius, Blake - 1976

Berkeley: University of California, 1976. First edition. Hardback. Very Good/Good. University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1976. First edition. Book condition: very good. Very slight bumping to corners and '20p' in ink to upper corner of ffep otherwise unmarked and very clean internally. Dust jacket: good. Unclipped. Generally rubbed and soiled. Some edge wear. Closed tear approx 2cms to upper edge and a small tear with slight loss (approx 0.5cms) to lower edge of front. Slight chipping to extremities of spine and to some corners. This is a study of the arts of landscape painting and landscape gardening as they influenced James Fenimore Cooper's use of landscape in his forest romances. The power of Cooper's visual imagination was unique among prose writers of his time. This study aims to demonstrate that Cooper was firmly grounded in the theories of the picturesque, in the British and Italian traditions of landscape painting and in the literature of landscape gardening; to marshal the largely neglected evidence of his letters, journals and travel books, in order to stress the importance of his seven year sojourn in Europe and how this altered his treatment of landscape in his fiction; and finally to modify the emphasis on the sublime in earlier studies of Cooper's landscapes.