Appalachian Pastoral

Michael S. Martin is currently an Associate Professor of English, Modern Languages, and Cultural Studies at Nicholls State University, in Thibodaux, Louisiana. He works in the fields of 19th-century American literature, Native American literature, Appalachian Studies, and colonial American literature. His current project traces a biographical and theoretical symmetry between Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne on silence and aurality in the 19th-century. Another recent project is a study of the way that sickness and exoticism functioned within the Louisiana section of William Bartram’s Travels (1791). Much of his writing has centered on portrayals of space and place in 19th-century American works, including recorded Cherokee orature from the 1890s.

• IntroductionChapter 1 “The Space around Me Appeared to be a Wilderness of Mountains”: Encountering Place in Antebellum Travel Narratives from the Interior Mountain EastChapter 2 New Settings, New Contexts for Pan and Faunus: “The country of herdsmen and shepherds”Chapter 3 Appalachia as Readable “Picturesque Touring”: David Hunter Strother, Henry Colton, and Imagined Sites of NostalgiaChapter 4 “The beautiful of the awe and sublime”: Appalachia’s New Testing Ground for Burke’s ConceitChapter 5 Towards a Rural Ideal: Appalachian Travel Writing and The Final Design within Landscape AestheticsEpilogue

'Appalachian Pastoral dramatizes the fluidity and dynamism of the field, encouraging us to explore the work of antebellum Appalachian travel writers in greater depth and detail.Thomas Hothem, The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer (Vol. 38, No. 2)