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Rural America

Herausgeber: Kley, Antje | Paul, Heike

American Studies – A Monograph Series, Bd. 253

2015

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Abstract

“The United States was born in the country”, Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “and remained emotionally attached to it long after it had moved away”, David B. Danbom added in his ‘History of Rural America’. Thus it may be argued that the study of American culture and civilization, first and foremost, needs to make sense of the rural. This multidisciplinary volume focuses on rural America, on areas seemingly apart from the political, economic, and cultural centers of the nation. Despite this apparent marginality, the rural often proves to be constitutive not only of regional but also of other subnational and even national American identities. Putting rurality at the center thus problematizes the well-established dichotomous models of city vs. country. The contributors to this volume address the rural as a mythic construction (e.g. as the American “Heartland” and as the centerpiece of a US pastoral tradition), as a (socio-)economic sector, as an imaginary time-space within American culture, and as the site of specific political, social, and cultural practices with, at times, transnational/global implications. The various perspectives on rural America are drawn from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies, environmental studies, and journalism.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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TABLE OF CONTENTS v
ANTJE KLEY AND HEIKE PAUL, Rural America: An Introduction 1
DAVID B. DANBOM, Americanism Distilled: The Place of the Countryside in American Thought 13
PHILIPP LÖFFLER, Thoreau’s Economy: Walden, Homestead Politics, and the Use of the Land in 19th Century American Culture 37
BRIGITTE GEORGI-FINDLAY, Origin Stories: Rurality and Nation-Building in the Western 53
MONIKA SAUTER, Fire from the Heartland: Women’s Activism from Phyllis Schlafly to Michele Bachmann 75
KERSTIN KNOPF, A Benighted America?: Slavery, Convict Labor, and Chain Gangs in American Prison Literature 95
CARMEN DEXL, Revisiting Spectacle Lynching and Reconfiguring the U.S. South: Economy and Racial Violence in James W. Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) 113
JENS TEMMEN, Overriding/Overwriting the Reservation: John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit 131
JERRY HAGSTROM, Coming Out of the Shadows: Minorities in Rural America 149
KATRIN THOMSON, The Power of the Rural Land in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998): Developing Film Literacy in the EFL Classroom 165
MARK BÜCHSEL, “He Was Never Dwarfed by the Landscape”: Jane Smiley’s Critique of the Jeffersonian Self-Sufficiency Myth in A Thousand Acres 187
JOCHEN ACHILLES, Real Machines in Imaginary Gardens: Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and Environmental Liminality in Flannery O’Connor’s “A View of the Woods 207
INGRID GESSNER, “A Country Life and Estate I Like Best for My Children”: Spatial Dialectics and the Contagiousness of Fear 227
ROGELIO SAENZ, Latinos and the Changing Face of Rural America 249
ARIANE SCHRÖDER, “Consumption’s Vampire Grasp”: Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Folk Healing in Rural New England 283
BARBARA CHING, Murder Ballads and Hunger Games: Re-Collecting Rural America 305
CHRISTIAN SCHMIDT, Nashville: The Authentic Heart and Soul of Country Music 327
NADJA GERNALZICK, Alt-Dot-ANY-Country Music 347
FRANK MEHRING, Down in the Valley: German Remediations of Rural America in the Musical Theater of Kurt Weill 373
FLORIAN GROSS, Creative Cities and Country Cool: New York City’s High Line as a Middle Landscape between Rural and Urban America 401
SINA A. NITZSCHE, The Rural Jostling the Urban: Photographing Spuyten Duyvil in Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York 425
KLARA STEPHANIE SZLEZÁK, Following the Cheese Trail: Vermont as a ‘Brand’ in Contemporary Food and Tourism Industries 447
Artists' Perspectives: Words and Images 471
STEWART O’ NAN, Introduction by Heike Paul 473
Calling 474
ANDREAS HORVATH, Introduction by Karin Höpker 483
Heartlands 484