LANDMARKS OF AMERICAN NATURE WRITING
from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley
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of an Exhibition of Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Engravings, and Photographs Related to the Literature of Nature Written about Western Virginia from the Seventeenth through the Twentieth Centuries, on View in the Tracy W. McGregor Room, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, 27 April - 14 July 1997 |
| landmark n. 1. A prominent identifying feature of a landscape. adj. Having great import or significance. --The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. Cursed be he who removes his neighbor's landmark. --Deuteronomy 27:17 |
Introduction | ||
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Two introductory sections of field guides and presidential materials precede the three main portions of the exhibition. |
1. Field Guides |
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| Part One: Early Encounters | ||
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Five sections display regional nature writing from the colonial and early Republic periods, including first editions of some of the most important documents of early American literature. |
3. Whose Nature, Whose Writing? |
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| Part Two: Jeffersonian Legacies | ||
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A single section devoted to Jefferson is followed by five sections that present nineteenth-century reactions to the landmarks he describes in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). |
8. Jefferson at Monticello |
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| Part Three: Changing Times | ||
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Six sections offer more recent representations of the Virginia landscape, beginning with fictional texts from the antebellum period and ending with modern memoirs and nature essays. |
14. Antebellum Fiction |
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The Height of Our Mountains forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press in Spring 1998
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