Estate Landscapes : Design, Improvement and Power in the Post-medieval Landscape
Estate Landscapes : Design, Improvement and Power in the Post-medieval Landscape

Author: Jonathan Finch

Publisher: Boydell Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781843833703

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An exciting study of the social and landscape phenomena of the Estate Landscape. In recent years, the post-medieval landscape has attracted new interest from archaeologists, historians, and geographers concerned to understand the development of the historic environment. One of the key structuring elements within these landscapes from the sixteenth century until the aftermath of the Second World War was undoubtedly the landed estate. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that any systematic attempt to quantify the presence of these estates was undertaken, prompted by the move to democratic reform and the persistent link between political power and landed wealth. Yet the importance of the landed estate in structuring power, social relationships, and both agricultural and industrial production was not limited to the UK. From the eighteenth century, the link between the UK estates and patterns of landholding and exploitation in the colonies became increasingly complex and recursive. This volume explores the relationships between the form and structure of British and Colonial estate landscapes, their agricultural management and the political structures and social relationships they reproduced. The articles address themes as diverse as the creation and development of the agrarian landscape, improvement, ornamental landscapes and gardens and estate architecture. Overall, it highlights the wealth and diversity of existing scholarship and suggests new directions for post-medieval archaeology in this dynamic area of research.

Empire of Vines
Empire of Vines

Author: Erica Hannickel

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-10-09

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0812208900

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The lush, sun-drenched vineyards of California evoke a romantic, agrarian image of winemaking, though in reality the industry reflects American agribusiness at its most successful. Nonetheless, as author Erica Hannickel shows, this fantasy is deeply rooted in the history of grape cultivation in America. Empire of Vines traces the development of wine culture as grape growing expanded from New York to the Midwest before gaining ascendancy in California—a progression that illustrates viticulture's centrality to the nineteenth-century American projects of national expansion and the formation of a national culture. Empire of Vines details the ways would-be gentleman farmers, ambitious speculators, horticulturalists, and writers of all kinds deployed the animating myths of American wine culture, including the classical myth of Bacchus, the cult of terroir, and the fantasy of pastoral republicanism. Promoted by figures as varied as horticulturalist Andrew Jackson Downing, novelist Charles Chesnutt, railroad baron Leland Stanford, and Cincinnati land speculator Nicholas Longworth (known as the father of American wine), these myths naturalized claims to land for grape cultivation and legitimated national expansion. Vineyards were simultaneously lush and controlled, bearing fruit at once culturally refined and naturally robust, laying claim to both earthy authenticity and social pedigree. The history of wine culture thus reveals nineteenth-century Americans' fascination with the relationship between nature and culture.

Susan Fenimore Cooper
Susan Fenimore Cooper

Author: Rochelle Johnson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780820323268

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Collected here are detailed and diverse essays, some that examine Rural Hours, Susan Fenimore Cooper's most famous work, and others that help establish Cooper as a major practitioner and theorist of American nature writing and as a socially engaged artist in many other genres. These essays discuss Cooper's uses and manipulations of various literary conventions, such as the picturesque, the literary village sketch, and domestic fiction, and illuminate her positions on conservation, religion, and woman's place in society. The engaging collection is divided into four sections. The first features essays examining Cooper's work in light of her relationship with her famous literary father, James Fenimore Cooper, and their devotion to and cultivation of each other's careers. The second focuses on Cooper's fascination with landscape and its relation to her environmental philosophies. Rural Hours is the subject of the third section, which presents new readings on its subtly crafted authorial stance, its two complementary conceptions of time, and its re-valuation of rural and scientific ways of knowing. The collection concludes with four works whose insights into Cooper's views on gender, domesticity, and environmental philosophy grow out of comparisons with several contemporary women writers. These remarkable essays by both established and emerging scholars of nineteenth-century literature present new findings and insights into a writer who is being reintroduced to the fields of eco-criticism and American literature.

Knights of the Brush
Knights of the Brush

Author: James F. Cooper

Publisher: Hudson Hills

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13:

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In these days of sensationalism, the images of the past often seem shadowy and rather vague. This work explores a period in American art and culture when both were infused with a strong sense of righteousness and the certainty that the artist must celebrate nature and the deity. The chapter headings--from "Seeing" to "Virtue," "Chivalry" to "Christendom"--echo the ideas expressed in the paintings, contrasting with what art critic Cooper sees as a cultural crisis in our times. Unfortunately, this work comes across as preachy and sentimental, perhaps because of the zealous morality of the time it examines. Still, the works of art, gathered from a wide variety of holdings, are an excellent record of a splendid age of landscape, and Cooper should be commended for preserving and evaluating these important records of a past era. One could only wish that the sense of moral judgment did not overwhelm the critical eye. Recommended for academic libraries and all libraries focusing on American art history. 58 colour & 2 b/w illustrations

Susan Fenimore Cooper
Susan Fenimore Cooper

Author: Rosaly Torna Kurth

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2016-08-19

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0595478166

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T hough primarily recognized as a nineteenth-century American nature writer and environmentalist who significantly influenced Henry David Thoreau, Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894) was also an accomplished and productive author in other diverse genres and literary forms, including a novel. In the first book published that treats all of Susan Fenimore Cooper's known writings, preceded by a concise biographical chapter that includes material from Cooper's personal letters, Dr. Rosaly T. Kurth views her literary canon with a wide-ranging lens. In her compelling study, Dr. Kurth uniquely incorporates Cooper's philosophy of environmental stewardship, on which scholars have thus far focused, into an expansive philosophy that includes familial, patriotic, and humanitarian stewardships, thus embracing the human element as well as the environmental. Dr. Kurth's research on the life and works of Cooper dates back to the early 1970s, during which time she discovered nineteen of Cooper's works, and as a result, in 1977, published the first extensive, annotated bibliography of her writings. In her engaging book, Dr. Kurth not only meaningfully and relevantly brings to her work other nineteenthcentury writers, including Thoreau, but also nineteenth-century women novelists, both English and American. Dr. Kurth also intertwines the results of her lifelong interest in fine art and artistic inclinations as she demonstrates, in instances, the results of Cooper's remarkable artistic tendencies as manifested in some of her writings. Included in this work are Cooper's impassioned series of articles, never before treated and with extensive documentation, that deal largely with the displacement of the Oneida Indians and their subsequent plight, and on related land issues, representing, in essence, the plight of the entire race. Comprehensively treated, Susan Fenimore Cooper's literary works reveal not only a learned, talented, cultivated, and creative woman writer, but also the observant, concerned, and enlightened mind of a woman expressing herself, timelessly, on momentous issues, not only of man in relation to the natural world around him but of man in relation to his fellow man.

Visions of the Land
Visions of the Land

Author: Michael A. Bryson

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0813921066

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Bryson (humanities, Evelyn T. Stone U. College, Roosevelt U.) discusses the connections between the representation of nature and the practice of science in America from the 1840s to the 1960s, as presented in the texts of seven American writers: John Charles Fremont, Richard Byrd, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Wesley Powell, Susan Cooper, Rachel Carson, and Loren Eiseley. The author considers how various scientific perspectives have influenced environmental attitudes; how selected writers of varied backgrounds, scientific training, and geographic experience have represented nature through a variety of natural sciences; and the relations among science, nature, language, and the human community. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper

Author: Wayne Franklin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 760

ISBN-13: 0300135009

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James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) invented the key forms of American fiction—the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary War romance. Furthermore, Cooper turned novel writing from a polite diversion into a paying career. He influenced Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Francis Parkman, and even Mark Twain—who felt the need to flagellate Cooper for his “literary offenses.” His novels mark the starting point for any history of our environmental conscience. Far from complicit in the cleansings of Native Americans that characterized the era, Cooper’s fictions traced native losses to their economic sources. Perhaps no other American writer stands in greater need of a major reevaluation than Cooper. This is the first treatment of Cooper’s life to be based on full access to his family papers. Cooper’s life, as Franklin relates it, is the story of how, in literature and countless other endeavors, Americans in his period sought to solidify their political and cultural economic independence from Britain and, as the Revolutionary generation died, stipulate what the maturing republic was to become. The first of two volumes, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years covers Cooper’s life from his boyhood up to 1826, when, at the age of thirty-six, he left with his wife and five children for Europe.