American Studies ETDs

Publication Date

7-30-1971

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation of the later, or art historical and aesthetic writings of James Jackson Jarves with the purpose of showing how Jares was the recipient of the colonial, Federalist and Jacksonian strains of aesthetic thinking of the United States, and how he combined these with contemporary European influences, especially Ruskin, Rio, Lindsay and Jameson to produce the first fully integrated documents on art by an American before American art and aesthetics became predominantly international in their concept and execution. An effort was made to trace the emergence and development of such canons of thought as idealism, pietism, and naturalism in the early religiously oriented periods of American history. Such ideas were pronounced primarily by men of letters and clergymen. Such men were the first Americans to concern themselves with writings dealing with the visual arts in keeping with America's early literary preference over a strongly visual culture that was disdained by Puritan, Calvinistic and Unitarian tenets.

Jarves, himself, admits his heavy reliance on John Ruskin and in his writings quotes in great length the English aesthetician. This dissertation attempts to realize the reasons for Ruskin's popularity in America during the Civil War period and what elements in his writings caused his decline from a place of dominance. Jarves was eventually to differ with his master on several important points and how these differences were expressed form a portion of the dissertation. Jarves and his contemporaries were to divert American aesthetic thinking away from Ruskin with a series of books and articles that reflected an increasing American concern for taste, refinement and nationalistic cultural identification immediately following the Civil War.

The dissertation places Jarves at the culmination of the early searchings for a cultural identification by the new nation and pictures his place in the unifying effort to produce a truly American aesthetic statement at a time when American thought, art, literature, political history and economic livelihood were dashing toward an international expression

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

American Studies

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

American Studies

First Committee Member (Chair)

Douglas Roland George

Second Committee Member

Ernest Warren Baughman

Third Committee Member

Joel M. Jones

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