|
|
|
REVIEWS
| A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture. By Michael Kammen (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 336 pp. $39.95).
|
| Spring, summer, autumn, and winter are nature-made periodizations with which people have long understood changes in their environments and lives. In A Time to Every Purpose, Michael Kammen examines how the seasons have inspired American cultural development. He moves through overlapping periods to study representations of the seasons, primarily in painting, popular illustration, poetry, and prose, but also in sculpture, glass, and media such as song, film, and advertising. Kammen argues that American investment in and modification of this nearly universal perspective have time and time again invigorated the nation's culture and memory. |
1
|
|
Kammen maintains that producing art and ideas about the seasons were among the ways that Americans reworked and moved beyond European traditions. Packed into the baggage that colonial Americans transported to the New World was Europe's centuries-old four seasons motif. There was nothing exceptional about the seasons supporting a national culture. Like landscape painting, four seasons art promoted cultural nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. During the mid-nineteenth century, cultural pioneers, most notably Henry David Thoreau, worked to establish the nation's seasons as exceptional. Kammen acknowledges that celebrating the seasonal beauty of the nation's wilder lands rather than fields and ornamental gardens was distinctive. Americans further distinguished their seasons from European seasons by emphasizing splendid fall colors and characterizing winter as both calm and a period of intellectual and spiritual growth. |
. . . |
There are about 738 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
