Front cover image for Beneath the second sun : a cultural history of Indian summer

Beneath the second sun : a cultural history of Indian summer

"Beneath the Second Sun is the first book to systematically treat the history and uses of Indian summer imagery in American life. The author focuses on the ways in which New Englanders traditionally have embraced the season, and he places the celebration of its beauty and its melancholy qualities within the context of Anglo-Native American relations. Sweeting does not try to locate the original definition of Indian summer, rather he explores the more interesting ways in which the season has been imagined and described in American culture." "Nineteenth-century authors such as Philip Freneau, Susan Cooper, Lydia Sigourney, John Greenleaf Whittier, Francis Parkman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, especially, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and William Dean Howells freely employed Indian summer imagery in their works. In the context of modern American Studies, Sweeting's book is part of a "post-modern" scholarly discussion of how tangible realities such as climate are mediated, even forged, by social needs. Sweeting further investigates the imaginative, early-nineteenth-century "invention" of New England regional identity and integrates traditional American Studies literary and historical concerns with a contemporary interest in the environment and sense of place."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©2003
University of New Hampshire, published by University Press of New England, Hanover, ©2003
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xii, 191 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
9781584653141, 9781584653301, 1584653140, 1584653302
51799389
The birth of a season: Indian summer before 1820
Science and sentiment: Indian summer in nineteenth-century popular culture
Fighting words: Native Americans and the naming of Indian summer
Indian summer and the creation of New England
With faith as in spring: Thoreau's Indian summer
Emily Dickinson and Indian summer: beneath the second sun
Coda: Indian summer in the twentieth century