The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and LettersAn original and highly unusual psycholinguistic study of American literature and culture from 1584 to 1860, this volume focuses on the metaphor of 'land-as-woman.' It is the first systematic documentation of the recurrent responses to the American continent as a feminine entity (as Mother, as Virgin, as Temptress, as the Ravished), and it is also the first systematic inquiry into the metaphor's implications for the current ecological crisis. |
Contents
Laying Waste Her Fields of Plenty | |
Singing Her Past and Singing Her Praises | |
Making It with Paradise | |
Notes | |
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Common terms and phrases
activity agrarian ambience American Farmer American pastoral appears archetypal assertion attempt Audubon beautiful Byrd Carolina chapter civilization claims Colony continent Cooper Crevecoeur cultivation culture Deerslayer dream earth edition England European experience explore fact fantasy Farmer James feminine fertile finally Force’s Tracts forest frontier garden guilt Hakluyt harmony Henry Nash Smith human Ibid Ike’s Indian inevitably intimacy James Fenimore Cooper Joel Kovel John John de Crevecoeur John Hammond Killdeer kind Kovel land land-as-woman landscape language Leo Marx Letters man’s masculine metaphor Mother narrative Natty Bumppo Natty’s natural world nature’s never novels nurturing once paradise passive pastoral impulse pastoral possibility patterns People’s Park Philip Freneau plantation poem political Porgy Porgy’s psychological reality regression reprint response Richard Hakluyt settlement sexual Simms’s sketches soil South southern suggests swamp symbolic trees unconscious violation Virgin Virginia vocabulary wild wilderness William Byrd William Gilmore Simms woods York