Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crevècoeur, and the Influence of Natural History

Describing Early America is a study of William Bartram's Travels, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer that situates them within two important intellectual traditions: the literature of travel and the science of natural history. Pamela Regis contends that the travel genre provided the narrative framework on which these texts were built, but that natural history offered much more: a way of looking at the world, a way of describing what the authors saw, and an overarching scheme in which to fit what they had seen.

Author: Pamela Regis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 04/21/1999
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.67lbs
Size: 8.53h x 5.57w x 0.71d
ISBN: 9780812216868

About the Author
Pamela Regis is Professor of English at McDaniel College and author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.