A summer of hummingbirds : love, art, and scandal in the intersecting worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade / Christopher Benfey.
2008
PS1541.Z5 B46 2008 (Mapit)
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Title
A summer of hummingbirds : love, art, and scandal in the intersecting worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade / Christopher Benfey.
ISBN
9781594201608
1594201609
1594201609
Imprint
New York : Penguin Press, 2008.
Language
English
Description
xv, 287 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Call Number
PS1541.Z5 B46 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification
811/.4
Summary
A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought at the close of the Civil War. Benfey takes the seemingly arbitrary image of the hummingbird and traces its "route of evanescence" as it travels in circles to and from the creative wellsprings of the age: from the naturalist writings of abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the poems of his wayward pupil Emily Dickinson; into the mind of Henry Ward Beecher and within the writings and paintings of his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. A Summer of Hummingbirds unveils how, through the art of these great thinkers, the hummingbird became the symbol of an era, an image through which they could explore their controversial (and often contradictory) ideas of nature, religion, sexuality, family, time, exoticism, and beauty.--From amazon.com.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-277) and index.
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Table of Contents
I: An oblique war
A tea rose
The prodigal
Beecher's pockets
Tristes tropiques
At the Hotel Byron
The prisoner of Chillon
Birds of passage
Covert flowers, hidden nests
Transits of Venus
Foggy bottom
A route of evanescence
Florida
Epilogue: Toward the blue peninsula.
A tea rose
The prodigal
Beecher's pockets
Tristes tropiques
At the Hotel Byron
The prisoner of Chillon
Birds of passage
Covert flowers, hidden nests
Transits of Venus
Foggy bottom
A route of evanescence
Florida
Epilogue: Toward the blue peninsula.