"Abandoned New England focuses on five modern American visual artists and poets - Winslow Homer, Robert Frost, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, and Elizabeth Bishop - who portrayed the stark traditional beauty of New England landscape. According to Priscilla Paton, their paintings and poetry of abandoned terrain ask: What does a landscape represent? What meaning can it have when nature's power appears supplanted by urban or technological forces and when the observing eye is no longer emblematic of an enlightened viewer?" "Abandoned New England pursues these inquiries by discussing shifting and conflicting cultural attitudes toward the wild, the rural, and the domestic. In her readings of texts and images, Paton explores landscape as the synthesis of the human and nonhuman, as a place simultaneously reflecting and resisting desire, as the setting for social dilemmas, as the scene of encounters with otherness and a past both lost and inescapable, and as an integral part of creating and limiting identity."--Jacket.