Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-08, Section: A, page: 2788.

Adviser: Jules D. Prown.

Recent publications in historical sociology and the history of consciousness suggest that the ability to appreciate natural environments as landscapes is socially constructed rather than intuitive or "natural." In the United States, the wide distribution of the mental skills necessary to the appreciation of mountains and other wild environments as landscapes dates from the 1820s and was an indirect effect of the rapid economic and demographic expansion of the Middle Atlantic and New England States. Chiefly because of their comparatively easy accessibility from the Hudson River and New York City, the Catskill Mountains were the single most important natural environment in the early history of landscape painting, literature, and tourism in the United States.

In Selling the Sublime, I explore the interconnected histories of Catskill Mountain painting, literature, and tourism in order to describe the historical process by which early and mid nineteenth-century Americans learned how to appreciate natural environments as landscapes and to value such experiences so highly as to be willing to pay for them. In the first four chapters, I am concerned with the popularization of landscape in the period 1776-1838. In these chapters, I pay particular attention to the influence of landscape ideas and values imported from Britain and to the economics of mountain tourism in the Catskills. Additionally, I demonstrate that the increasing popularity of landscape literature and painting in the United States in this period was simultaneously an effect and a cause of the growing ease and popularity of landscape tourism. Major figures discussed include Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving.

In the last chapter and in five appendices, I trace the changing structure of Catskill Mountain art, literature, and tourism in the period 1839-1876. Among the major figures discussed are Sanford Gifford, John F. Kensett and Charles Herbert Moore. Throughout the dissertation, I pay close attention to the influence of popular forms including mass-produced engravings, stereoviews, travel narratives and travel guidebooks.