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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative
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February, 2005
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Book Review

Canada and the United States



Sarah Burns. Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xxiii, 303. $39.95.

Thomas Cole's crumbling tower silhouetted against a lowering sky illustrated on its cover is a tantalizing hint of the troubled world that Sarah Burns resurrects in the pages of this fascinating book. Burns has sought out the morbid, violent undercurrents that, she argues, literally "haunted" the American imagination throughout the nineteenth century. According to Burns, this "constellation of themes and moods" such as "horror, fear, mystery, strangeness, fantasy, perversion, monstrosity, insanity" (pp. xvii-xviii, xix) has been recognized and studied in American literature and popular culture but until recently has not been associated with nineteenth-century American painting. Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe serves as the omnipresent spirit of this study; Burns deftly weaves his work throughout her narrative. . . .

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