American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature.(Brief Article)

American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature. Edited by David C. Miller (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993) 344 pp. $40.00

American Iconology serves as a model for innovation in interdisciplinary history, for Miller's volume is an integration of art and literary criticism within the wider purview of nineteenth-century cultural and social issues. In most respects, the symbiosis is successful. The series of essays juxtaposes, for instance, imagery--from Charles Wilson Peale's Mammoth skeleton to displays in the late nineteenth-century studio interior--with textuality--labor in a Jeffersonian political economy and department store …