Casey analyzes agrarian ideal in newly published book

Janet Galligani Casey, visiting professor of English and American studies, is the author of a new book titled A New Heartland?Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (2009, Oxford University Press).

Casey traces the ideals informing America?s conception of the rural across a wide field of representational domains, including social theory, periodical literature, cultural criticism, photography, and, most especially, women?s rural fiction (?low? as well as ?high? ). Her argument is informed by archival research, most crucially through a careful analysis of The Farmer? s Wife, the single nationally distributed farm journal for women and a little known repository of rural American attitudes.

University of Virginia scholar Rita Felski calls A New Heartland ?a thoughtful and thought-provoking study that will help to transform our understanding of the relationship between modernity and rural life. Casey breaks new ground in bringing accounts of rural life into explicit dialogue with theories of modernity, in her archival research, and in drawing attention to unfamiliar or rarely discussed texts.?

An award-winning author (her 1998 book Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine received the Modern Language Association?s Prize for Independent Scholars; she also won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 2003-04), Casey also edited The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction (2004, Iowa University Press).

Click here to read more about A New Heartland.