New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian Vie ...

attention to historical changes in the region. Their attempts to reconcile temporal contradiction in the New England landscape as well as the subjective division within themselves lead to greater tension within the words they articulate, which in turn results in even more distinctly identifiable verse. This process of personal and historical definition ultimately produces four successfully original New England voices, allowing the reader to revisit, through literature, what has figuratively and literally become the oldest region in America as if for the first time.

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The approach used in New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian View absorbs the predominant trend in the scholarship of literary representations of the American landscape, which considers historical readings in relation to the imaginative experience of the environment. Of particular early significance are the socio-historical considerations that emerge in Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land; the American West as Symbol and Myth, which considers how the idea of settling in the expansive and undeveloped frontier informs the nation’s culture, and the psychosexual readings of the American writer in relation to the wilderness, which appears in seminal studies like D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and Leslie Fielder’s Love and Death in the American Novel. These critical perspectives begin to define an American landscape tradition insofar as they consider the romantic experience of the literal and figurative newness of the country. Fielder especially locates a distinctly American character through a psychoanalytic reading of the individual in relation to nature that greatly differs from depictions in European literature. Later texts, such Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, read the interaction between historical forces and cultural imagination to draw different conclusions, demonstrating how, for example,Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia offered a needed pastoral ideal around the time of the industrial revolution. Like cultural history, the history of nature itself proves important in transforming America, as shown in such studies as Lawrence Buell’s The