Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
English
Date of Award
5-2015
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
Mark Holland
Committee Members
Michael Cody, Tess Lloyd
Abstract
The Great Plains are prevalent among the literature of the nineteenth century, but receive hardly a single representation among the landscapes of the Hudson River School. This is certainly surprising; the public was teeming with interest in the Midwest and yet the principal landscape painters who aimed to represent and idealize a burgeoning America offered hardly a glance past the Mississippi River. This geographical silence is the result of a tension between idealistic and empirical representations of the land, one echoed in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Margaret Fuller’s more physical and intimate Transcendentalism unifies this tension in a manner that heralds the rise of the Luminists and the plains-scapes of Worthington Whittredge.
Document Type
Thesis - unrestricted
Recommended Citation
Vines, Jacob L., "Encounters with the American Prairie: Realism, Idealism, and the Search for the Authentic Plains in the Nineteenth Century" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2511. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2511
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.
Included in
American Art and Architecture Commons, American Literature Commons, Cultural History Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons, United States History Commons