River Imagery As National Iconography

Tricia Cusack. Riverscapes and National Identities. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010. Illustrations. xii + 237 pp. $29.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8156-3211-5. Reviewed by Harvey K. Flad Published on H-HistGeog (November, 2011) Commissioned by Robert M. Wilson (Syracuse University) Rivers and river valleys have long been recog‐ spect to style, visual perspective, and the physical nized as key features in the study of cultures and or cultural features that are included or left out. the histories of civilizations. In Riverscapes and Cusack is a lecturer at the Centre for Euro‐ National Identities, Tricia Cusack focuses on how pean Languages and Cultures at the University of images of selected river landscapes, here given Birmingham. She has written on issues of nation‐ the title as riverscapes, helped create national alism, gender, and ethnicity with a multidisci‐ identities. They are a visual text to the national plinary approach that incorporates political and imagination, she argues, as they constitute a form critical theory as well as social and art history. of understanding of how the abstract idea of a na‐ Each chapter is well documented with scholarly tion in the nineteenth century was idealized and bibliographical references for each of the fve na‐ realized through the artist’s lens. tion-states, artists, and art works examined, with Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-centu‐ the major paintings illustrated in black-and-white ry artists portrayed rivers and their natural and illustrations. A selected bibliography of works cit‐ cultural landscapes as representations of national ed and index are equally informative. identity. For example, Thomas Cole and his follow‐ An interdisciplinary humanistic review of the ers in the Hudson River School of Art imagined origins and construction of nationalism frames the river and its surrounding wilderness as shap‐ the work. A “civic” origin, based on a given terri‐ ing a nation out of the New World. Similarly, Cu‐ tory and dependent on universalist political sack fnds other artists and their works codifying rights, is contrasted with an “eth‐ nationalism along four other European rivers: the nic”/“ethnocultural” origin, “the latter based upon Thames, the Seine, the Volga, and the Shannon. shared cultural traditions and a common inheri‐ The paintings are placed in their historical, politi‐ tance” (p. 9). In a departure from more prosaic cal, and social contexts, and examined with re‐ H-Net Reviews political treatises associated with the former ap‐ dependent Irish Free State to build a hydroelectric proach, Cusack writes convincingly that art and power dam. artists are central to the development of national‐ Cusack offers elements that constitute a ist sentiment, all the while focusing on an individ‐ “riverscape” and how they might be considered ual river and its imagery at the core of a social separately from “mere landscape” (p. 12). Howev‐ construction of each nation-state. er, her case against using the term “landscape” re‐ Over space and time, artists have portrayed mains problematic. The various meanings of the each river’s varied cultural and topographic fea‐ term are explored by the cultural geographer tures to create separate national identities. Cusack Kenneth Olwig (Landscape, Nature and the Body is at her best when she describes the cultural and Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s social landscapes through which her “national New World [2002]) in the historical development rivers” fow. She forcefully depicts the signifi‐ of nationalism and nationalist ideology in Great cance of painted images of St. Paul’s Cathedral Britain and America, although he focuses on the‐ and the House of Parliament along the banks of ater and stage sets rather than paintings.[1] the Thames as symbols of the power of the civil Withal, the argument for “riverscape” is per‐ government and Anglican church in defining Eng‐ suasive as it more clearly defines the visual image land by J. M. W. Turner, while impressionist paint‐ as the mode of representation and analysis. Much ings by Claude Monet and others of well-dressed like “seascape,” used by art historians to describe women and boaters along the banks of the Seine a nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting of indicate the importance of leisure and social class the ocean, seashore, or coastal environment, so, in the emergence of France’s Third Republic. Reli‐ too, a riverscape should focus ultimately on the gion, political history, and ethnicity also contrib‐ flowing river and its banks. On occasion, Cusack ute to the formation of national identity as por‐ expands her spatial vision to include the wilder‐ trayed in paintings of the Volga and the Shannon ness of the Catskill Mountains where Cole sought where the latter divides a country between its the sublime in the cloves and deep dark woods, or Gaelic West and British East. she suspends the view of the river itself when not‐ Regional differences, such as upriver or ing artistic representations of gender or ethnic downriver, can play a part in the difficult task of groups. Nevertheless, in all fve case studies, the creating national unity. Upriver along the author impressively argues that paintings of Thames, the river runs through a picturesque pas‐ rivers as specific landscape features can be read toral landscape that is the very essence of “En‐ to symbolize national identity. glishness,” while downriver it fows past the Cusack’s writing is crisp and her theoretical docks and public buildings of the City of London, framework concisely drawn. Riverscapes and Na‐ global images that portray “Britishness.” In con‐ tional Identity is a model of interdisciplinary sidering that national identity may therefore work in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. change over time, Cusack suggests that such na‐ Historians and political scientists will fnd much tional rivers may be “Janus-faced” (pp. 9-10). to admire in the author’s use of the fne arts to un‐ Their ethno-cultural histories may face backward derstand the development of the nation-state in to a mythic or romanticized, usually rural, past, or the nineteenth century; art historians will discov‐ forward toward a modern, usually urban, future. er how a critical theorist can reread well-known The conflict between such nationalist imagina‐ paintings; and cultural and historical geographers tions becomes explicit in the description of the will recognize an original work in landscape stud‐ River Shannon and the decision by the newly in‐ ies and humanistic geography. 2 H-Net Reviews Note [1]. Cusack does not cite Olwig nor the geogra‐ phers Yi-fu Tuan and David Lowenthal, both of whom have examined landscape literature and art, although she does follow the geographer Stephen Daniels’s declaration that paintings by Turner, John Constable, and Cole incorporate “the power of landscape as an idiom for representing national identity in England and the United States.” Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Land‐ scape Imagery & National Identity in England & the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 243. what l and up as I w e i will might - Kenneth Olwig, Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to Amer‐ ica’s New World (Madison: University of Wiscon‐ sin Press, 2002. If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.org/h-histgeog Citation: Harvey K. Flad. Review of Cusack, Tricia. Riverscapes and National Identities. H-HistGeog, H- Net Reviews. November, 2011. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34659 3 H-Net Reviews This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4.

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