This collection of essays addresses the ways in which American and British writers, painters and photographers have represented the American environment. Focusing on such figures as Jefferson, Crè vecoeur, John Neal, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Cole, Samuel Morse, Fanny Kemble, Dickens, Hawthorne, Clarence King and Edward Curtis, the authors explore the preconceptions, ideologies, and rhetorical and aesthetic conventions that shaped attitudes to the North American continent. With its numerous illustrations, including early photographs of the American West, this...

Most books on the American musical are little more than exercises in nostalgia. The specially commissioned essays that make up Approaches to the American Musical take a different view of the form. Going beyond the common assertion that musicals are simply escapist, these examinations of American stage and film musicals argue that Porgy and Bess, Top Hat, Kiss Me Kate and All That Jazz were popular precisely because they engaged with such important American issues as ethnicity, commerce and international relations.

This book attempts an interpretation of Revolutionary American culture. It argues that the cultural identity of the United States, like its political identity, emerged from a quarrel with the Old World. Europeans believed that the Revolution had 'turned the world upside down'. American intellectuals tried to construct a republic which refuted European criticism. They failed, but in failing they created an attitude to the terrain which became a central theme in American culture. The book employs the methods of perceptual geography and close textual analysis to examine images of the terrain and...