This Vast Book of Nature
Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, 1784–1911
Pavel Cenkl
“The White Mountains, along with the Hudson River and the Adirondacks, were one of the first places that Americans learned to love the sublime, the awe-inspiring, the wild. These peaks have served many other intellectual purposes over the years as well—and anyone who has ever hiked the Great Gulf or Tuckerman’s Ravine will want to read Pavel Cenkl’s fine account of all the meanings they’ve carried.”—Bill McKibben, author, Wandering Home
“Where others might see only a mountain range, Pavel Cenkl sees cultural history. He has produced his own kind of White Mountain guidebook, exploring the many layers of meaning that people have applied to those peaks over time. This book will be valuable to anyone interested in the way Americans produce cultural significance from their natural surroundings.”—Kent C. Ryden, author, Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New England
This Vast Book of Nature is a careful, engaging, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire—and, by implication, other wild places—have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers from the post-Revolutionary era to the days of high tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on tourist brochures, travel accounts, pictorial representations, fiction and poetry, local histories, journals, and newspapers, Pavel Cenkl gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic.
Starting with an exploration of Jeremy Belknap’s 1784 expedition to Mount Washington, which Cenkl links to the origins of tourism in the White Mountains, to the transformation of touristic and residential relationships to landscape, This Vast Book of Nature explores the ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically, through settlement, development, and—most recently—preservation, a process that continues today.
Pavel Cenkl received his BA from Brandeis University, his MA from the University of New Hampshire, and his PhD from Northeastern University. He is a member of the adjunct faculty in the Heritage Studies Program at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire. He lives just north of the White Mountains and divides his time among teaching, writing, and raising his son.
American Land & Life Series208, 2006
$34.95 hardcover 1-58729-498-2
Available September 2006
Writing the Trail
Five Women’s Frontier Narratives
Deborah Lawrence
“In Writing the Trail, Deborah Lawrence’s thoughtfully rendered portraits of five westering women poignantly depict the dynamic interplay between traveler and frontier lands. In a clear, accessible style, Lawrence casts these compelling, memorable narratives and shows us the West from a decidedly woman’s perspective.”—Susan Imbarrato, author, Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America
“Deborah Lawrence effectively translates scholarship into lucid prose that interconnects history, biography, analysis, and scholarship. She breaks new ground with her selection of writers and gives us fresh insight into the cultural dynamics of an age as well as the evolution of modern, industrial, and postindustrial American life. Writing the Trail is a significant contribution to women’s studies, American literature, American western literature, and memoir/life-writing studies.”—Susan Naramore Maher, professor and chair, University of Nebraska at Omaha
For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives—Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier—to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s.
Throughout their very different journeys—from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess” on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest—these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions.
Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.
Deborah Lawrence is associate professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. Her current project is a study of the historic trails of the Southwest.
184, 2006$29.95 hardcover 1-58729-509-1
Available October 2006
Intricate Relations
Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789-1814
By Karen Weyler
“If the most informative map of a nation’s imagination is created by surveying its anxieties, then Karen A. Weyler’s Intricate Relations is the foundational chart of the American psyche. Triangulating sex, property, and institutional discipline in a host of fictions, conduct books,political tracts, and popular imprints, Weyler traces the haunted landscape of the early republic, where debt, seduction, and madness were situated in city, town, and country with no haven of security.”—David S. Shields, editor, Early American Literature
Intricate Relations charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers: sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789 and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler recreates and illuminates the larger, sometimes opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read.
In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase “intricate relations” to describe the complex imbrication of sexual and economic relations in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief job of the “moral historian,” a label that most novelists of the era embraced. In a republic anxious about burgeoning individualism in the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the novel foregrounded sexual and economic desires and explored ways to regulate the manner in which they were expressed and gratified.
In Intricate Relations, Weyler argues that understanding how these issues underlie the novel as a genre is fundamental to understanding both the novels themselves and their role in American literary culture. Situating fiction amid other popular genres illuminates how novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster, Samuel Relf, Susanna Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Sally Wood synthesized and iterated many of the concerns expressed in other forms of public discourse, a strategy that helped legitimate their chosen genre and make it a viable venue for discussion in the decades following the revolution.
Weyler’s passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary theorists and scholars in women’s and American studies.
Karen Weyler is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Available January 2005
292 pp, 9 photos, 2005
$39.95 hardcover 0-87745-884-7
August 31, 2006