| Both Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson identified the yeoman farmer as the representative American, articulating an agricultural vision for the nation in what has come to be called “the agrarian myth.” This dissertation explores the agrarian myth and its association with pastoral and nostalgic literary tradition in nineteenth-century antebellum and late twentieth-century American writing, examining the ways fiction and memoir show the yeoman's complex representation. Although the farmer was putatively celebrated through most of the nineteenth century, an analysis of works by James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Caroline Lee Hentz, which portray the yeoman as a bumpkin, suggest the agrarian myth was challenged shortly after its inception and reveal an inherent incompatibility between the myth's farmer and the newly emerging urban, middle class entrepreneur. Late twentieth-century texts, such as John Updike's Of the Farm, Douglas Unger's Leaving the Land, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Annie Proulx's Postcards, and Don Kurtz's South of the Big Four, suggest that the farmer's full entry into the entrepreneurial model for American success has rendered the agrarian myth obsolete, a change that has also negatively impacted the health of America's land, communities, and individuals.; However, a number of contemporary literary writers are offering a “new vision”—both socially and environmentally—for the agrarian myth. Wendell Berry's A Place on Earth and Arthur Versluis's Island Farm rehabilitate the farmer's relationship with the land and community, while Jane Brox's Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain , Ann Mohin's The Farm She Was, and Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer further revise the myth by allowing female farmers a central role in an ecologically-based agrarian and egalitarian culture. Margaret Walker's Jubilee, John Nichols in The Milagro Beanfield War, David Mas Masumoto's Epitaph for a Peach, Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes, and David Anthony Durham's Gabriel's Song rewrite the agrarian myth in terms of environmental and racial justice as well, bringing farmers of color into the American pastoral. |
