Abandoned New England
Subtitle: landscape in the works of Homer, Frost, Hopper, Wyeth, and Bishop
By: Priscilla Paton.
Series: Revisiting New England
Publisher: University Press of New England; New Hampshire
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Hanover [N.H.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 282
Subjects: Arts, American -- 20th century; Landscape in art; Landscape in literature; New England -- In art
Genres: In art.
Description: "Abandoned New England focuses on five modern American visual artists and poets - Winslow Homer, Robert Frost, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Elizabeth Bishop - who portrayed the stark traditional beauty of New England landscape. According to Priscilla Paton, their paintings and poetry of abandoned terrain ask: What does a landscape represent? What meaning can it have when nature's power appears supplanted by urban or technological forces and when the observing eye is no longer emblematic of an enlightened viewer?" "Abandoned New England pursues these inquiries by discussing shifting and conflicting cultural attitudes toward the wild, the rural, and the domestic. In her readings of texts and images, Paton explores landscape as the synthesis of the human and nonhuman, as a place simultaneously reflecting and resisting desire, as the setting for social dilemmas, as the scene of encounters with otherness and a past both lost and inescapable, and as an integral part of creating and limiting identity."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-267) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : lost prospects; title: Rustic sophistication : lionizing Winslow Homer, defending Robert Frost; title: Power and impotence : the black figure and the prey in Winslow Homer's Outdoors; title: The hick on the hillside, the woman at the window : Frost's rustics; title: Gothic loneliness : the different cases of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth; title: The landscape of desire : Elizabeth Bishop and the feminine earth; title: The vernacular ruin and the ghost of self-reliance; title: Epilogue.