To describe America, 1835-1941
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- When John James Audubon wanted to make life-like paintings of birds, he killed them. Assembled during the first decades of western expansion, The Birds of America (1838) catalogues herons and hawks and species extinct within a century of its publication, and as often participates in the precariousness it hopes to suspend. "To Describe America, 1835-1941" explores a long century of American description, and brings together writers and artists whose work becomes an urgent attempt to capture fleeting experience and fragile object-life amid environmental and social loss. My chapters move through time and across genres to reveal a diversity of descriptive practice, and its response to an evolving national identity and sense of place. I show how geology, the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the sublimated violence of the Civil War shape landscape writing in the 1860s; how the twinned media of portraits and telescope photography describe what we cannot see; how the pioneering flash photographers George Shiras and Jacob Riis document disappearing Midwestern wilderness and tenement life in New York City at the turn of the century; how novelists, filmmakers, photographers, and WPA writers and artists adapt the nineteenth century panorama to depict natural and socioeconomic disaster in Depression-era California; and how United States Signal Service Corps records and the George R. Stewart novel Storm (1941) register an ambivalent relationship between science and belief, individual and climate.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bolten, Rachel Heise |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Richardson, Judith |
| Thesis advisor | Ruttenburg, Nancy |
| Degree committee member | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Degree committee member | Richardson, Judith |
| Degree committee member | Ruttenburg, Nancy |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rachel Heise Bolten. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/rw511jv4108 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Rachel Heise Bolten
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...