Charles Brockden Brown, "Edgar Huntly", and the Origins of the American Picturesque

Berthold, Dennis

doi:10.2307/1919207

Cited by 20 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…As she succinctly puts it: “Landscape becomes a reduplication of a picture that preceded it”. Quickly, this mode of appreciating landscape was appropriated by American writers who in the late 18th and early 19th century began to use “Gilpin's aesthetic formulas to appreciate the sublime wilderness of the New World and harmonize it with the civilized beauties demanded by Old World standards” (Berthold :67). A century later, by the 1880s and 1890s, the rural category of the picturesque had “migrated to urban scenes where it was applied to ragged street urchins and crumbling buildings” (Brooks :38) with artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, who had previously been known to photograph derelict mills in the countryside, embarking on a portfolio he called Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies (1897).…”

Section: Ruins Cinema and The Picturesquementioning

confidence: 99%

Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema

Andersson

2016

Antipode

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In this article I discuss 1980s New York cinema through the conceptual lens of landscape, drawing in particular on the interconnected but separate traditions of the pastoral and the picturesque. While the former mode of representing landscape is idealizing (the shepherd/nymph-motif), the latter with its origins in the period of the enclosures of the English countryside tends to aestheticize poverty and dispossession. This distinction can productively be deployed in relation to tensions between glamorization and exploitation in 1980s New York cinema, which often dealt with the themes of rent, eviction, and unemployment in postindustrial settings. Focusing in particular on Downtown 81 (Edo Bertoglio, 1981/2000 and Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985), I argue that the current nostalgia for a pre-gentrified and less regulated New York in popular culture is dependent on these idealizing and aestheticizing tendencies insofar that they conceal or prettify some of the darker aspects of the period.

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Section: Ruins Cinema and The Picturesquementioning

confidence: 99%