ABSTRACT
As the United States was busily engaged in transforming itself from an agrarian republic into an urban and eventually metropolitan nation, improved technologies of inscription (e.g., steel engraving, lithography, steam-driven printing presses) made possible the production and wide dissemination of elaborate landscape representations that anticipate more recent developments in electronic media. Most typically, landscape paintings and prints of the nineteenth century portrayed the sublime wilderness or the pastoral countryside, suggesting that this was the true America, and attributing moral and political significance to the act of gazing on such scenes. The Home Book of the Picturesque, for example, makes this claim explicit in its introduction: “To our mind, this book on American Scenery has an import of the highest order. The diversified landscapes of our country exert no slight influence in creating our character as individuals, and in confirming our destiny as a nation” (Deakin 3). Problematically, such representations address an audience for whom the idealized wilderness and idyllic pastoral countryside exist only as places to visit-and virtual rather than actual places at that. That is, these scenes of American culture that so intensely engage the moral citizenship of the viewer depict places where the people who view them do not (and for the most part, cannot) actually live.
