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Describing Early America is a study of William Bartram's Travels, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer that situates them within two important intellectual traditions: the literature of travel and the science of natural history. Pamela Regis contends that the travel genre provided the narrative framework on which these texts were built, but that natural history offered much more: a way of looking at the world, a way of describing what the authors saw, and an overarching scheme in which to fit what they had seen.
Price: $29.95
Pages: 200
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication Date:
21 April 1999
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9780812216868
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
HISTORY / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), History of the Americas, SCIENCE / Natural History
"Regis offers a valuable and challenging revision of contemporary understanding of her subjects' literary purposes and the place of these texts in American literary history."
Pamela Regis is Professor of English at McDaniel College and author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Prologue: Recovering a Lost Paradigm
1. Natural History in Context
2. Description and Narration in Bartram's Travels
3. Jefferson and the Department of Man
4. Crèvecoeur's "Curious observations of the naturalist"
5. The Passing of Natural History and the Literature of Place