Degraded Heartland

Antipastoral, Agriculture, and the Rural Modern in US Literature

Maria Farland

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781421452432
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della critica letteraria

How did rural America come to be viewed as backward and inferior, and how did literary modernism respond to and critique this perception?

What happens when rural America—long romanticized in pastoral literature—becomes associated with deficiency, degradation, and decline? Maria Farland's Degraded Heartland is the first critical study of US literary antipastoral, a mode that exposes the stark realities of rural poverty and ecological devastation while highlighting the jagged process of modernization in the countryside. It provides a historical account of how ideas of rural backwardness developed in US literary culture.

Positioned against idealized visions of rural life, the antipastoral interrogates ideas of rural backwardness and deficiency, emphasizing the perceived need for reform through capital investment, mechanization, and education. Antipastoral literature reflects the modernizing impulse—embodied in machinery, scientific agriculture, and incipient agribusiness—while exposing the disruptions these changes provoked. It responds to the nineteenth-century panic around "wastelands" and disturbing episodes like the Eugenics Survey of Vermont and its fascination with rural "degeneracy."

Degraded Heartland reveals how writers like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and W. E. B. Du Bois grappled with the uneven transformation of the American countryside. In dialogue with agricultural and rural reform discourse, their works underscore the tension between persistent stereotypes of rural stagnation and the realities of a rapidly evolving heartland. This book challenges the dominance of metropolitan modernism and enriches our understanding of the rural modern as a vital and contested space in American culture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 "The Little Barren State of Massachusetts": Dickinson, Plants, and Rural Progress
• 2 "All the Changes of City and Country": Agriculture and (Re)generative Antipastoral in Walt Whitman
• 3 Thoreau Against the Grain: The Antipastoral in Walden
• 4 "Yankee Agrarian": Robert Frost, the Degenerate Farmer, and the Elevation of the Rural Mind
• 5 New Negro Agrarians: Antipastoral, Rural Uplift, and the Harlem Renaissance
• 6 Prairie Migrants: Modernism, Agricultural "Fitness," and Immigrant Farm Fiction
• Conclusion. Degeneration Now, Degeneration Forever
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index