Sowing Rural Vision: Imagining the Farm in the American Agriculturist, 1842-1878
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- July 26, 2023
- Creator
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Mandravelis, Stephen Walter
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art and Art History
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the contribution of the illustrated agricultural periodical, the American Agriculturist (1842-1851, 1853-present), to a dominant but unexplored artistic vision of rural life in the Victorian-era United States. One of the largest and most widely read periodicals of the period, the Agriculturist has primarily interested scholars as a textual document which disseminated new agrarian knowledge. But the farming journal was also extensively engraved, containing both scientific illustrations of tools, plants, livestock, and farming procedures, as well as artistic depictions of rural work and domestic bliss. Drawing from the fields of Art History, Material Culture Studies, Agricultural History, and Visual Communication, I analyze the Agriculturist as an artistic document which participated in the mid-nineteenth-century’s rapid profusion of pictorial images. I argue that the journal’s depictions of demotic agrarian material culture provided an unprecedented vision of rural American life, with its tantalizingly obtainable mimetic style starkly diverging from typical visual expressions of the Agrarian Myth. Accordingly, the Agriculturist began to fundamentally shift how Americans imagined their own rural existences. Through five progressive chapters, I explore how the Agriculturist taught its readers to consume different types of pictorial images and to utilize them to construct a new imaginative vision of rural life. By examining how a practical and scientific journal incorporated and advanced art and engravings during the height of a pronounced pictorial turn in American culture, this project brings attention to a type of mass imagery which has previously escaped concerted attention. Moreover, this project provides important insight into the formation of visual acuity in Victorian culture, as well as the birth of an aspirational visual vocabulary of the American farm. Indeed, the Agriculturist’s use and subsequent transformation of the mythic conception of the Agrarian Ideal serves as the basis for contemporary understandings of the Farm to Table, Organic Food, and Sustainability movements.
- Date of publication
- 2018
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Advisor
- Cao, Maggie
- Herman, Bernard L
- Greenhill, Jennifer A
- Barrett, Ross
- Magee, Carol
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2018
- Language
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This work has no parents.
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