American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature, and: Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture (review)

Farming is hard work. However, literary views of rural life often conceal the labor needed to produce the appealing scenes they present. One reason for this distortion is the persistence of the pastoral as a mode for representing life in the country: in common use, the term pastoral can refer to almost any pleasing rural vista; more narrowly, it designates the activities of shepherds, as distinct from farmers. Georgic, from Virgil's time forward, is the term for a representation of a landscape that acknowledges labor. Working with disparate materials, Timothy Sweet and William Conlogue share a desire to reintroduce labor into readings of the American rural landscape.

With American Georgics, Sweet offers a wide-ranging examination of the agricultural work of North American men and women as seen through the lens of literature. Sweet's work is ambitious in its scope: despite the title, he begins with works that are not American (Virgil's georgics, More's Utopia) and ends with texts that are not early (Thoreau's Walden, George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature). The decision to explicate more than four centuries of writing about the environment in the compass of one hundred and seventy-six pages, plus notes, is the most striking feature of this book, and responsible in large part for both its virtues and its shortcomings.

Sweet's greatest achievement is his ability to integrate hundreds of years of discourse about the North American continent into a cohesive narrative of evolving perceptions of environment and humankind's role in shaping it. Cooper scholars can see the antecedents of Natty Bumppo's dilemmas in the writings of the Haklyuts; scholars of contact literatures can see how ideologies of land use and possession play out in Crèvecoeur and Jefferson. Sweet offers a compelling new synthesis of familiar texts in an ecocritical framework. The same range that makes American Georgics compelling can also make it exasperating. At times, Sweet's impatience to move from one text to another can prove frustrating, especially for readers who want to know what Sweet has to say about their particular fields of interest. This pace, however, is an unavoidable evil in a book that exhibits the twin virtues of erudition and brevity.

Conlogue's Working the Garden picks up more or less where Sweet's study leaves off. Conlogue demonstrates, however, that the progressive models advanced by George Perkins Marsh and his ilk do not establish the paradigms for farming in the twentieth century. Instead, Conlogue traces the advancing industrialization of farming, beginning with Frank Norris's unfinished wheat trilogy and concluding with Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, a resetting of King Lear on a large Iowa farm. Along the way, Working the Garden takes up not only familiar narratives of agricultural struggle, like O, Pioneers! and The Grapes of Wrath, but also noncanonical texts, including A Gathering of Old Men, a saga of African American farmers in Louisiana, and the Actos performed by members of Cesar Chavez's farmworkers movement in the 1960s.

Some of Conlogue's most compelling readings are of rejoinders to these stories of dispossession and exploitation. He pairs the familiar Grapes of Wrath with Of Human Kindness, a novel written in response to Steinbeck and a "vigorous defense of industrial farming" (96); he parses a 1994 article from the Lancaster Farmer to show how thoroughly the values of U.S. farming have become the values of agribusiness. In a similar vein, he uses the fortuitous appearance of the obituaries of Cesar Chavez and Julio Gallo in the same issue of California Farmer to illustrate the contest between labor and management in...