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

Ryan, Terre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558498737 ISBN 13: 9781558498730

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

Synopsis

Although the aesthetics have evolved, contemporary 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Americans' cultural love affair with their country's landscape started in the nineteenth century, when expansionism was often promoted as divine mission, the West was still the frontier, and scenery became the backdrop of nationalist mythology. With a promise of resources ripe for development, Manifest Destiny--era aesthetics often reinforced a system of environmental degradation while preserving the wide and wild view. Although the aesthetics have evolved, contemporary 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 often frame commercial projects and national myths according to 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 types of media, nineteenth-century perspectives on landscape continue to inform mainstream perceptions of the environment, 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 every day and places them into a larger national narrative.

About the Author:

Terre Ryan completed her MA in creative writing at City College of New York and her PhD in English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Department, Loyola University Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1558498737
• ISBN 13: 9781558498730
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 171