Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature : Topographies of Skepticism (Hardcover)

Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville and the Diffusion of Estrangement: 1. Critiquing colonial American geography: Hawthorne's landscape of bewilderment; 2. Thoreau and the interminable journey of vision 'nearer and nearer here'; 3. Herman Melville's home cosmography: voyaging into the inscrutable interior of the American republic; Part II. Historicizing the American Vanishing Point: Indian Removal, Slavery and Class: 4. The cultural politics of American literary ambiguity; 5. Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and 'Chief Seattle's Speech': the obliquities of the geographic in-between; 6. The power of negative space in Douglass's autobiographies and in Davis's 'Life in Iron Mills'; Conclusion.