Frederick Law Olmsted: a pragmatic exception to Transcendental writing. Issue 3 (2nd July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ferguson, Benjamin
• Is Part Of: Studies in travel writing. Volume 24:Issue 3(2020)
• Page Start: 283
• Page End: 297
• Publication Date: 2020-07-02
• Subjects: Frederick Law Olmsted -- US travel writing -- environmentalism -- transcendentalism; Travelers' writings -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 820.9355
• DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2020.1902097
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1755-7550

Abstract

ABSTRACT: There has been a resurgence of interest in Frederick Law Olmsted's career, yet his landscape architecture tends to overshadow his travel writing. This article offers a re-appraisal of his literary oeuvre, which, in its often epistolary and direct style, along with his uniquely technical eye, may strongly resonate with a technology-focused twenty-first century that prizes pragmatic and journalistic writing on topics of social problem-solving. The article suggests that Olmsted's work serves as an important reference point for a strain of US travel writers whose work is similar to that of the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists in focusing on a shift away from Europe and toward finding identity – and perhaps "transcendence" – in American "wildness", but who can be seen as exceptions to that movement for their practical, often technocratic, approaches, as they mix their diverse careers with their travel writing.