Contents

• Introduction: Nature and aesthetics in nineteenth-century America
• Tracking nature’s truth : Susan Fenimore Cooper
• The metaphor of progress : Thomas Cole and the improvements of the American picturesque
• The metaphor of refinement : Andrew Jackson Downing and the moral prescription for landscape
• The metaphor of reason : Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental dominion
• Passion for nature beyond metaphor : from Walden to Henry David Thoreau’s late natural history projects
• Conclusion: The canalization of metaphor