American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature

American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature analyses the influence of British Gothic novels and historical romances on American art and architecture in the Romantic era. American artists and architects were among the most avid readers of Gothic fiction, which in turn informed their artistic output. In a period of increasing nationalism, the Gothic Revival architectural style in particular served to legitimise the American landscape with the materiality of European culture. At the core of this book is an analysis of American architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an understudied era. Key figures include Thomas Jefferson, Washington Allston, Alexander Jackson Davis, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, Edwin Forrest, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne articulated the subject of this book when he wrote that he could understand Sir Walter Scott's romances better after viewing Scott's Gothic Revival house Abbotsford, and he understood the house better for having read the romances. From the very beginning, the Gothic Revival has been a phenomenon that crosses modern disciplinary boundaries. The groundwork in Gothic literary scholarship allows us to move beyond literature to examine how the Gothic seeps into other forms of artistic creation. This interdisciplinary book investigates the symbiotic relationship between the arts and Gothic literature to reveal new interpretative possibilities.