Body and soul: Landscape aesthetics, the market revolution, and the nineteenth-century American wilderness

This thesis is a study of the relationship between landscape aesthetics and the development of the American wilderness. Following the recent studies that have argued for an understanding of wilderness as culturally determined construct, this study seeks to demonstrate the importance of aesthetics such as the sublime and picturesque to American representations of the natural world as well as to the establishment of the early national and state parks. This study argues that as totalizing modes of representation, the sublime and picturesque---along with the introduction of market based forms of consumption---naturalized American natural scenery, thereby creating new public spaces such as tourist attractions in the process. As public spaces, and because aesthetic experience is often culturally and historically contingent, early tourist sites such as Niagara Falls became sites of racial and social contestation. Along with an analysis of the influence of the sublime and picturesque in the early works of Thomas Cole and Ralph Waldo Emerson, this work also analyzes the advent of commercial tourism at Niagara Falls during the antebellum period. As the nation's first popular tourist attraction, Niagara Falls serves as an excellent case study in both the historically and socially contingent nature of aesthetic experience and the application of the sublime and picturesque as modes of landscape representation and tourism in nineteenth-century America.