| Chapter 1: | Romantic Antiquarian Literature |
Through analysis of both written and visual representations of prehistoric architecture, the author reveals how modes borrowed from European literature and painting were employed in antiquarian texts across several centuries and used to advance European colonial interests, and later to establish the national identities of both Mexico and the United States. Evans demonstrates convincingly how elements borrowed from Romantic painting were used in eighteenth-century antiquarian texts to suggest ties between ancient civilizations of the Old World and Mesoamerica.
The Romantic Antiquarians
The Romantic Antiquarians in the United States, connected in their status as Euro-American males, represented diverse life situations, worldviews, and geographic perspectives. This book focuses on Romantic Antiquarian writers in Upstate New York, a pivotal vortex of the movement, where a rich literature was inspired by the artifacts and earthworks now associated with the Iroquoian cultural continuum and the written history and oral lore that served collectively to mythologize the confederacy. Writers analyzed in the pages ahead include De Witt Clinton, politician, champion of the Erie Canal, proud Free Mason, and author of A Memoir of the Antiquities of the Western Parts of the State of New York (1818); Josiah Priest, a weaver of sensational frontier yarns, pro-slavery advocate, and New York saddlemaker whose American Antiquities, and Discoveries in the West (1833) was a bestseller; and Joshua V. H. Clark, a gentleman farmer by vocation and amateur scholar who studied the prehistory and history of Onondaga County. Through a process of self-selection, characters such as these formed a kind of informal commission to explore and write the story of U.S. prehistory, until the task was officially assumed by academic-governmental institutions that produced an alternate narrative based upon their own investigations and that was radically at odds with antiquarian theories.
This book, departing from traditional categorizations, identifies and treats Romantic Antiquarian writing as a subcategory of American Romanticism. The antiquarians’ contributions have long been overlooked since they were so profoundly discredited by the work of their successors and prodigies, namely, archaeologists.