American Picturesque
A remarkable and masterful contribution, this book is an enlightening explication of Conron's offer of the picturesque as the definitive aesthetic of the mid-19th-century US. --R. M. Labuz, CHOICEAs the histories of emotions and senses become important areas of historical inquiry, Conron's book demonstrates the value of paying closer attention to aesthetic consciousness as primary sites of feeling and essential frames of social knowledge. American Picturesque is a wonderfully rich and suggestive book.He offers both a deft synthesis of the work of literary critics and historians of art and architecture and an inspiringly original and satisfying interpretation of aesthetic consciousness. --Elizabeth Blackmar, Journal of the Early RepublicConron is as capable in analyzing landscape painting, genre painting, urban planning, and landscape design as in discussing literary texts. The twenty-five color plates and 131 figures are essential features of a book in which verbal and pictorial vocabularies are fully integrated. All the illustrations are handsomely and purposefully presented and enhance the value of the volume for students of the picturesque in all its varied forms. Consistently sensitive to the eternal picture which nature paints (to borrow a phrase from Emerson), Conron has produced a book ambitious in conception and scope as well as authoritative in execution --Kent P. Ljungquist, Resources for American Literary StudyAs the histories of emotions and senses become important areas of historical inquiry, Conron's book demonstrates the value of paying closer attention to aesthetic consciousness as primary sites of feeling and essential frames of social knowledge. American Picturesque is a wonderfully rich and suggestive book.He offers both a deft synthesis of the work of literary critics and historians of art and architecture and an inspiringly original and satisfying interpretation of aesthetic consciousness. --Elizabeth Blackmar, Journal of the Early RepublicConron is as capable in analyzing landscape painting, genre painting, urban planning, and landscape design as in discussing literary texts. The twenty-five color plates and 131 figures are essential features of a book in which verbal and pictorial vocabularies are fully integrated. All the illustrations are handsomely and purposefully presented and enhance the value of the volume for students of the picturesque in all its varied forms. Consistently sensitive to the eternal picture which nature paints (to borrow a phrase from Emerson), Conron has produced a book ambitious in conception and scope as well as authoritative in execution --Kent P. Ljungquist, Resources for American Literary Study