Introducing the book as a whole, this chapter argues that the rise in popularity of the picturesque in mid-nineteenth-century America was a discipline of transforming landscapes to serve bourgeois ideological purposes, not simply a vogue in landscape aesthetics. Centering on the work of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852), whose influential writings and designs shaped the creation of the suburbs, new urban parks, and reconfigured domestic spaces, the Introduction traces the social meanings of the picturesque in late eighteenth-century England and its popularization in the United States in scenery books, aesthetic treatises, and design books in the 1830s and 1840s. Literary landscape genres had a role in popularizing the picturesque and helping middle-class Americans to imagine a new national landscape. In theorizing this role, the Introduction also recovers a literary tradition that has been largely excluded from the dominant narratives about nineteenth-century American literature.
