land of picture": novelized art and visual literature in cole, cooper, and hawthorne, 1826-1860 | IUP Islandora

"a land of picture": novelized art and visual literature in cole, cooper, and hawthorne, 1826-1860. (2016). "a land of picture": novelized art and visual literature in cole, cooper, and hawthorne, 1826-1860.

Download PDF

Metadata

MODS Metadata


Title	land of picture": novelized art and visual literature in cole, cooper, and hawthorne, 1826-1860
Abstract	In this study, I use a blended-genre approach to reading canonical literature and art in the United States during the antebellum period. Acknowledging that the mediums of art and literature are both narrative-driven and dependent upon techniques of visualization, I examine works that show marked hybridity of form, identifying artists and writers practiced in synthesizing media and genres to create hybridized texts. I suggest that reframing the aesthetic canon to include a blended-genre paradigm provides an alternative mode of analysis for understanding the cultural work of American Romanticism. I focus my study on canonical American Romantic art and literature for its powerful narrative voice in the construction of national identity, locating convergent practices in three major works: The Course of Empire paintings by Thomas Cole, The Crater by James Fenimore Cooper, and The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I also identify blended-genre practice in Cole's poetry and prose, Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and selected short stories by Hawthorne. I consider how convergences circulated from one text to another and recover a submerged discourse of the time period. Connecting Cole, Cooper, and Hawthorne through The Course of Empire, I suggest their use of the cyclical theory of history as a foundation narrative for the establishment of American identity, and Cole's paintings as an influence used to explore the projected fate of the United States. I also suggest that an unexpected outcome of antebellum American Romantic art and literature was the suppression of a unique American national identity even as Cole, Cooper, and Hawthorne eagerly sought to provide a national art and literature for the emergent nation. I consider the interdiscursivity of blended-genre practices and its production of discourses that challenged a "master narrative" of Manifest Destiny during the antebellum period. Reading beyond traditional genre boundaries, I re-envision the cultural work of writers and artists of American Romanticism, illuminate submerged discourses, and provide a new understanding of historical and cultural conditions within which art and text were created.
Date	2016

Details

Title: land of picture": novelized art and visual literature in cole, cooper, and hawthorne, 1826-1860
Personal Name(s): Ryan, Ellen Hallstrom
Thompson, Todd
Corporate Name(s): Indiana University of Pennsylvania
English.
Note: Publisher info.: Dissertation/Thesis.
Advisors: Thompson, Todd Committee members: David Downing; Christopher Orchard.
Topical Subject(s): Art history
American literature