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The Great American System: The Cosmi...

Jacks Gamble, Lauren.

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The Great American System: The Cosmic Aesthetic in the Revolution and Early Republic.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The Great American System: The Cosmic Aesthetic in the Revolution and Early Republic./
Author:	Jacks Gamble, Lauren.
Description:	327 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-06(E), Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International77-06A(E).
Subject:	Art history. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=10008749
ISBN:	9781339454665

The Great American System: The Cosmic Aesthetic in the Revolution and Early Republic.
Jacks Gamble, Lauren.

The Great American System: The Cosmic Aesthetic in the Revolution and Early Republic. - 327 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-06(E), Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2015.

Historical studies of early national America routinely construe its visual culture as stunted and uninspired, as exhibiting, as the historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have contended, a certain "wasteland quality." This dissertation by contrast finds a thriving, complex program of art at play in the late eighteenth-century United States, one by turns systematic and quixotic.

ISBN: 9781339454665Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122701
Art history.

The Great American System: The Cosmic Aesthetic in the Revolution and Early Republic.
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100 1 $a Jacks Gamble, Lauren. $3 3277631
245 1 4 $a The Great American System: The Cosmic Aesthetic in the Revolution and Early Republic.
300 $a 327 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-06(E), Section: A.
500 $a Adviser: Alexander Nemerov.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2015.
520 $a Historical studies of early national America routinely construe its visual culture as stunted and uninspired, as exhibiting, as the historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have contended, a certain "wasteland quality." This dissertation by contrast finds a thriving, complex program of art at play in the late eighteenth-century United States, one by turns systematic and quixotic.
520 $a I argue that a single aesthetic modeled after the heliocentric solar system dominated the visual and material culture of the American Revolution and the early Republic. Invoked often by political theorists during the era as a model for federal government, the solar system supplied a template for the American state, whose new central government structurally paralleled the cosmos's central sun. Practitioners of the visual arts translated this commonplace verbal conceit into visual form, flooding the early Republic with concentric and radial imagery symbolizing the new nationalist order. Center-periphery designs surfaced in early national emblems and currency, in battle maps and flags, in paintings, architecture, and urban plans. I argue that this heliocentric aesthetic configured a symbolic form for American federalist political theory, merging the Enlightenment's deist understanding of the natural world as a rationally designed construct with the centralized mechanics of the state. I moreover contend that this center-periphery format self-referentially mapped the era's model of art and the envisioned disseminative network of empiricism, where visual objects were accorded the sensual power to outwardly shape their environs. In chapters analyzing the manifestation of the cosmic aesthetic in late eighteenth-century American astronomy, military experience, architecture and urban design, economic practice, and temporal philosophy, I posit the founding generation's sweeping ideal national paradigm as a great American system with its parts interdependent and orderly outspread.
520 $a But despite the imagined clean and tidy array of the Federalists' experiential order, my analysis unsparingly takes their cosmic conceit to its logical conclusion. The solar system, they would find, involves cycle as much as system, rendering darkness and seasonal shift an ineludible part of their cultural model's workings. I condude the dissertation by probing the fall of the Federalists and their heliocentric aesthetic, interpreting the ascendancy of Jeffersonian Republicanism at the turn of the century as engendering a new prevailing national model of decentralized space and linear time. Nineteenth-century artists, I argue in my final chapter, further drained the founding form of its rhetorical power, subversively employing the prior era's aesthetic only to indict and nullify it, supplanting Enlightenment rational system with a new Romantic visual ethos.
520 $a In the epilogue, I suggest what endures from the fall of the Federalists and their aesthetic through a case study of the northwestern frontier town of Marietta, Ohio, settled in 1788 by a band of New England nationalists In 1801, the settlers converted an ancient concentric Indian mound extant at the site into the city's cemetery, as if to entomb the Federalists' founding form synchronously with their party's broader downfall. I conclude the manuscript by interpreting this aesthetic gesture as an articulation of both the limits of rational system and the deliverance that surfaced out of the Federalists' demise.
520 $a By unearthing the theoretical and nationalistic heft of the era's visual production, this study thus overturns the predominant understanding of the unoriginality and conceptual deficiency of late eighteenth-century American visual practice. Directly challenging the idea of a long nineteenth century, a construct often invoked by art historians as an interpretational framework for early American visual culture, I instead posit the American Enlightenment's artistic output as a distinct and profound movement in its own right.
590 $a School code: 0265.
650 4 $a Art history. $3 2122701
650 4 $a American studies. $3 2122720
690 $a 0377
690 $a 0323
710 2 $a Yale University. $3 515640
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 77-06A(E).
790 $a 0265
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2015
793 $a English
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=10008749