In this chapter, Halloran “explore[s] some nineteenth-century representations of the picturesque, with a specific emphasis on their rhetorical significance. I will try to show that the picturesque in literature and art served a purpose traditionally associated with the kind of oratory practiced at public ceremonials… [His] thesis, then, is that nineteenth-century picturesque representation was an attempt to articulate an American identity. The landscape-in colonial times a wilderness to be subdued and cultivated for use-became a mystical repository of Americanness and a locus of praise for the young nation” (227). Picturesque representations “depict…an inviting natural landscape touched lightly by human cultivation; the scene is pastoral. Second, it conveys a strong sense of harmonious visual composition; in this case, the scene recalls a great number of nineteenth-century paintings… Third, the scene is supposed to excite a moral response in the viewer” (229).“The picturesque strand in the Romantic sensibility tended to be both narrative and nostalgic. It represented the natural world as a scene for life lived at a simpler and more tranquil pace. In American picturesque imagery, this tendency was expressed in references to colonial and Revolutionary times and in mythologized portraits of native Americans…These references, and the scenic images that were their tokens, in turn entered the developing national culture” (236-7).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Tags
All
|