Florian Freitag 
The Farm Novel in North America [PDF ebook] 
Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845-1945

Provides the first history of the North American farm novel, a genre which includes John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, and Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine.


From John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath and Martha Ostenso’s
Wild Geese to Louis Hémon’s
Maria Chapdelaine, some of the most famous works of American, English Canadian, and French Canadian literature belongto the genre of the farm novel. In this volume, Florian Freitag provides the first history of the genre in North America from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to its apogee in French Canada around the middleof the twentieth. Through surveys and selected detailed analyses of a large number of farm novels written in French and English, Freitag examines how North American farm novels draw on the history of farming in nineteenth-century North America as well as on the national self-conceptions of the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, portraying farmers as national icons and the farm as a symbolic space of the American, English Canadian, and French Canadian nations. Turning away from traditional readings of farm novels within the frameworks of regionalism and pastoralism, Freitag takes a comparative look at a genre that helped to spatialize North American national dreams.


Florian Freitag is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany.

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Introduction

Surveying the Fields

Early Sowings: St. John de Crèvecour’s ‘History of Andrew, the Hebridean, ‘ Patrice Lacombe’s
La terre paternelle, and Susanna Moodie’s
Roughing It in the Bush

Laws of Nature: Frank Norris’s
The Octopus, Albert Laberge’s
La Scouine, and Frederick Philip Grove’s
Settlers of the Marsh

New World Demeters: Willa Cather’s
O Pioneers!, Louis Hémon’s
Maria Chapdelaine, and Martha Ostenso’s
Wild Geese

Rich Harvests: Joseph Kirkland’s
Zury, the Meanest Man in Spring County, Claude-Henri Grignon’s
Un homme et son péché, and Frederick Philip Grove’s Fruits of the Earth

Fields of Crisis: John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath, Félix-Antoine Savard’s
Menaud, maître-draveur, and Robert Stead’s
Grain

The Cycle of Seasons: Louis Bromfield’s
The Farm, Ringuet’s
Trente arpents, and Grace Campbell’s
The Higher Hill

Epilogue

Works Cited

Index