ABSTRACT
The extraordinary variety of the terrain of the continent tends to be read through filters of emotion, inspiration and, at times, terror, in an historically habitual taste for the grandiose interpretation of the land which runs from the divinely appointed readings of the Puritans, through the Burkean and Kantian sublime of the revolutionary and romantic periods, and on to the eco-catastrophists of the present day. The concomitant tendency simply to abandon land that fails to deliver its Utopian promise is the dark side of unrealistic and unrealizable American expectations about the land. The prehistories which the European colonizers substituted for the actual history of the North American continent were also ancient, but belonged to European traditions rather than to the colonized land. The Emersonian land remains as empty and as unavailable to history or community as in the problematic Eurocentric versions of the American sublime.
