The forest : a fable of America in the 1830s / Alexander Nemerov.
Material type:
TextSeries: A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; XXXV, 66.Publisher: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2023]Description: 277 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780691244280
- 0691244286
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | NonFiction | 701.0309 N433 | Available | 33111010973424 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A vivid historical imagining of life in the early United States
"One of the richest books ever to come my way."--Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News
"This is a wonderful book. . . . An extraordinary achievement."--Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters--such as Thomas Cole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner--are well known, while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs.
The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths or go their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For Alexander Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions of the people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs, The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.
Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the United States in the 1830s, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s imagines how individuals at the time experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, this book follows painters, poets, enslaved individuals, farmers, and artisans through various settings. Some, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nat Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edgar Allan Poe, are well-known; others are not. All are creators of private and grand designs, and makers of the worlds they inhabited. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each is an episode revealing a lost world of intricate relations: human beings going their own ways or crossing paths, in a place that is known to history, or is remote and unknown. For Alex Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, as he writes, "the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate life to lead." Nemerov's art history is at its center an experiment in writing, in how to write differently about visual culture. The Forest examines the history of the United States on a human scale, displaying the patterns of life alongside examples of paintings, prints, photographs and objects"-- Provided by publisher.