In this compelling, accessible study, Michael S. Martin surveys nineteenth-century depictions of southern Appalachia. For many readers, the authors and texts he considers will be unfamiliar. In fact, many of the primary texts Page 225 →are out of print. This is unfortunate. Martin’s cogent readings of these works demonstrate their importance not only in terms of literary history, but also regional identity. Even fictionalized travel guides, he ably demonstrates, have defined southern environments and culture.

Martin builds his argument on a strong theoretical foundation that combines ideas from the Myth and Symbol School of American studies (notably R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden) with those of ecocriticism, which considers how the “real-world mountain space” shaped “poeticized prose portrayals.” More specifically, he shows that antebellum understandings of Appalachia reflect a collision between the visceral experience of the mountains themselves and the shaping influence of British landscape aesthetics. Pastoralism becomes a “framing device” that allows writers to confront “an unknown landscape through a literary trope familiar to Northern readers.”

There were also, of course, nonliterary forces that influenced perceptions of Appalachia. These include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps, which were “created for furthering commercial and national interests,” understandings of the “land mass and topography” inherited from “native populations,” and the “forces of westward expansion and development that informed American nationalism as a whole during the nineteenth century.” For writers such as Caroline Howard Gilman, whose Poetry of Travelling in the United States provides vivid sketches of antebellum Charleston as well as the southern highlands, these cultural dynamics made Appalachia both familiar and inexplicable. Literary tradition, particularly pastoralism, provided a way of bridging the gap between actual terrain and readers’ expectations.

Martin’s point comes into particularly sharp focus through his discussions of Philip Pendleton Kennedy’s Blackwater Chronicle (1853) and David Hunter Strother’s Virginia Illustrated (1857). Both writers juxtaposed “real-life, scientific observations” with “fictional narratives.” They did so to appeal to an “upper-class readership” that was already familiar with literary traditions. At the same time, their use of the pastoral, notably the claims that Appalachia constituted a new Arcadia, defined the region as an escape from the busyness of urban life. The Blackwater Chronicle, in fact, offers “a type of cultural tourism or voyeurism for the Northern reader into both the culture and natural world of the ‘undiscovered’ Appalachian Mountains.” Strother, who provided illustrations for Kennedy’s work and Harper’s Magazine, continues the mythology, showing land cleared for farming but without the presence of tools or people. Even cultivated spaces appear inviting because Page 226 →they remain unscarred. The Appalachian Mountains thus become a kind of “natural paradise” or “perpetual Arcadia that nullifies, or at least ameliorates, the overarching conflict between nature and culture.”

To a large degree, the texts Martin explicates promoted tourism, an enterprise that values both the unique and the familiar. Travelers long to see something unusual but without the inconveniences of the foreign. Henry Colton’s Mountain Scenery: The Scenery of the Mountains of Western North Carolina and Northwestern South Carolina (1859) and Strother’s Virginia Illustrated sought to balance these desires through their application of picturesque traditions, their depictions of social class, and their appeals to nostalgia. Colton’s descriptions of such “memorable scenes” as Caesar’s Head and Table Rock, which he imagines “rising in stern grandeur,” demonstrate his ability to use the picturesque evocatively. At the same time, he makes the region “known” through his assurances that upper-class visitors will find “luxuriantly adorned” accommodations in Asheville.

Beautiful scenery, of course, makes up only part of the mountains’ visual appeal. There is also the sublime—that overwhelming, sometimes terrifying, sense of greatness that leads the viewer toward the ineffable. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British philosopher Edmund Burke provided an influential treatise on the sublime, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which, Martin demonstrates, influenced American travel writers. In a particularly compelling discussion, Martin contrasts William Gilmore Simms’s depictions of coastal South Carolina, notably in his novel The Yemassee (1835), with his portrayals of the Appalachian Mountains in such works as Southward Ho! A Spell of Sunshine (1834). Although both texts celebrate the natural world, they do so for different purposes. The Lowcountry embodies the beautiful, whereas the mountains evoke the sublime; the former offering reassurance and comfort, and the latter, a sense of the majestic. In this way, Simms’s descriptions of the Carolinas separate the various “regions according to Burke’s model of landscape features.”

In his final chapter, Martin uses the interdisciplinary approaches associated with rural studies to examine idealistic understandings of Appalachia hinted at in the various travelogues he studies. Writers, he reveals, understood rural areas “dialectically in relation to developed land and urban areas.” In doing so, they often extended the sort of valorization of agrarianism found in Thomas Jefferson’s writings. In Philip Pendleton Kennedy’s works, recurring references to railroads join “the natural and the technological” in ways that promise to preserve the mountains’ “pure wilderness” Page 227 →while promoting accessibility and comfort. Ann Newport Royall offers a more ambivalent understanding. For her, the landscape contributes to some of the least laudable characteristics of the inhabitants, including many of the caustic stereotypes still applied to rural populations. At the same time, Royall, like her contemporaries, imagines an ideal country life without cities, an Appalachia of “workable farmlands” cultivating the “crops best suited for that particular ecosystem.” Elisha Mitchell—the minister, geologist and professor for whom the highest peak east of the Mississippi is named—offers a similar vision. His responses to his beloved mountains speak to his aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific interests. At the same time, he imagines “a restorative component to the natural realm and an improvement in farming practices in Appalachia.” Martin concludes his study with a brief epilogue that urges Appalachian Studies scholars to “look backwards and gain historical grounding before moving forward.” He notes that understandings of Appalachian culture remain too centered on the twentieth century, almost as if the region was invented by the 1965 mapping project of the Appalachian Regional Commission. As Martin skillfully shows throughout his study, Appalachian culture existed during the antebellum period and grew out of European and regional traditions, some of which predate the nation.

Michael S. Martin has done important work in this study. He demonstrates how many long-forgotten, quasifictional texts have shaped understandings of a vitally important region. He also reveals the complicated interactions between imaginative constructions—particularly, British pastoralism—and the actual environments in which writers find themselves. This clearly written, carefully argued, and handsomely illustrated study will be of great interest not only to historians and literary scholars but also to those who feel the irresistible draw of our beautiful southern mountains.

Christopher D. Johnson, Francis Marion University