This book is about the ways American and British writers, painters and photographers have represented the American environment. It brings together essays by American, British and European scholars which consider the one hundred and twenty years following the Revolution and examine the preconceptions, ideologies, rhetorical and aesthetic conventions that shaped attitudes to the North American continent. While ranging widely, the essayists focus on such figures as Jefferson, Crevecoeur, John Neal, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, Fanny Kemble, Dickens, Hawthorne, Clarence King and Edward Curtis. Amongst the places featured in the discussions are the Niagara Falls, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Virginia's Natural Bridge, Mount Ktaadn and a Broadway omnibus. The book contains numerous illustrations, including early photographs of the western United States, and will be of interest to specialists and students of American literature, history and culture.

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Foreword Leo Marx; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles; Part I. Prospects: 2. 'Gilded backgrounds': reflections on the perception of space and landscape in America Clive Bush; 3. The impermanent sublime: nature, photography and the Petrarchan tradition Olaf Hansen; 4. American landscape and the figure of anticipation: paradox and recourse Stephen Fender; 5. Trails of topographic notions: expeditionary photography in the American West Philip Stokes; Part II. Anglo-American Perspectives: 6. The absent landscape of America's eighteenth century Robert Clark; 7. Ecriture and landscape: British writing on post-revolutionary America Christopher Mulvey; 8. Dickens goes west Robert Lawson-Peebles; Part III. American Illustrations: 9. The old world and the new in the national landscapes of John Neal Francesca Orestano; 10. Landscape painting and the domestic typology of post-revolutionary America Graham Clarke; 11. Winter landscape in the early Republic: survival and sentimentality Bernard Mergen; 12. The dark view of things: the isolated figure in the American landscapes of Cole and Bryant Allen J. Koppenhaver; 13. The figure of the Indian in photographic landscapes Mick Gidley; Index.