| More than just a tendency for representative space to be symbolized in literary works, the analog of literary and architectural style is distinctly featured in American culture. American architects and architectural thinkers dealt with the same material, often reached the same conclusions using identical images, figures, and schemes, and in general confronted the challenge of the not-yet-Americanized cultural landscape in parallel fashion to American writers. Both arrive at a peculiarly materialist usage of the traditional troplogy.;The novels and romances of Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper demonstrate that just as these writers can be said to contribute to the innovation of a truly native American literature, so, too, they invent what will be America's prototypical literary manifestation of the architectural correspondence. Select works of Irving are seen as a variation upon this prototype.;Hawthorne's biography traces almost exact correspondence to the use of architectural tropes in his fictions and journals. His Septimius Studies and personal correspondence illuminate much of Hawthorne's thinking on the idea of a literary architecture.;Melville's response to the popular understanding of domestic architecture is everywhere apparent in his fiction. Of all the writers of the period, it is Melville who has garnered the most critical attention; his immersion in the visual arts in general and architecture in particular was often immense and bears upon any thorough understanding of his fiction and poetry. One example of Melville's linkage of architectural and writerly metaphors is seen in his tendency to place his narrators high up in structure looking out on things below, whether it is Ishmael or others looking down from the foretop, narrating down from "The Two Towers," Bartelby staring at nothing from a high office window or ironically down in the "Tombs" (a building deeply resonant for its architectural innovations, which shares points in common with the story), or Melville himself viewing Mt. Greylock from his study window at Arrowhead--and dedicating Pierre to the mountain he sees; or whether it is Melville's transformation of these analogies to a reaffirmation of faith and career in Clarel and Timoleon. |
