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This Ecstatic Nation: The American Landscape and the Aesthetics of Patriotism

Amazon.com Price:  $5.70 (as of 16/04/2019 02:33 PST- Details)

Description

Americans’ cultural love affair with their country’s landscape began in the nineteenth century, when expansionism was once frequently promoted as divine mission, the West was once still the frontier, and scenery became the backdrop of nationalist mythology. With a promise of resources ripe for development, Manifest Destiny–era aesthetics frequently reinforced a system of environmental degradation at the same time as preserving the wide and wild view. Even supposing the aesthetics have evolved, up to date media are filled with American landscape images inspired by the nineteenth century.

Terre Ryan examines this phenomenon by exploring the overlapping trails of national mythology, landscape aesthetics, patriotic discourse, and public policy. Tracing her journeys around bombing grounds in Nevada, logging sites in Oregon, and energy fields in Wyoming, she argues that business and government agencies frequently frame commercial projects and national myths in step with nineteenth-century beliefs about landscape and bounty. Advertisements and political promotional materials following this aesthetic framework perpetuate frontier-era ideas about the environment as commodity, scenery, and cultural trashlands. Transmitted through all kinds of media, nineteenth-century perspectives on landscape continue to inform mainstream perceptions of our surroundings, environmental policies, and representations of American patriotism.

Combining personal narrative with factual reportage, political and cultural critique, and historical analysis, Ryan reframes the images we see each day and places them into a larger national narrative.

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