A Time to Every Purpose

The Four Seasons in American Culture

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by Michael Kammen

University of North Carolina Press

Due/Published March 2004, 400 pages, cloth

ISBN 080782836X

Kammen traces the appeal of the four seasons motif in American popular culture and fine arts from the seventeenth century to the present. Its symbolism has evolved through the years, Kammen explains, serving as a metaphor for the human life cycle or religious faith, expressing nostalgia for rural life, and sometimes praising seasonal beauty in the diverse American landscape as the most spectacular in the world. Kammen also highlights artists' and writers' shift in attention from the glories of seasonal peaks to the dynamics of seasonal transitions as American life continued to accelerate and change through the twentieth century.

Few symbols have been as pervasive, meaningful, and symptomatic in the human experience as the four seasons, and as Kammen shows, in its American context the annual cycle has been an abundant and abiding source of inspiration in the nation's cultural history.

Contents

Prologue
Introduction: Seasonal Cycles and Sequences
Ch. 1. From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century in Europe
Ch. 2. The American Reception and Adaptation of the Four Seasons Motif
Ch. 3. Nostalgia, Nationalism, and the American Seasons, 1854-1914
Ch. 4. American Transitions: The Seasonal Sense of Place, Time, and Imagery
Ch. 5. Nature Writers, Reader Response, and the Ambivalence of Urban America
Ch. 6. The Four Seasons and American Popular Culture: Calendars and Consumerism
Ch. 7. The Four Seasons in Contemporary American Art and Poetry
Conclusion: Science and the Seasons, Retrospection, and Reprise
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index