Farm: A Multimodal Reader

In Farm, Joyce Kinkead, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill explore the culture of agriculture through a diverse and multicultural collection of fiction, poetry, essays, art, recipes, and folklore. This reader views farming through a variety of lenses, leading students to consider what farms, farming, and farmers mean, and have meant, to culture in the United States.
 
The text guides the reader through the Jeffersonian idealism of the yeoman farmer (“cultivators of the earth are the chosen people of God”) to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Thoreau’s “The Bean-Field,” Cather’s prairie trilogy, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Carpenter’s Farm City). Contributors provide historical context for the literary texts, such as discussion of sharecropping vs. plantation systems, the rise of agribusiness and chemical farming, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. Written, visual, and oral texts ask readers to consider the farm in art (Grant Wood), ecology (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), children’s and young adult literature (classic children’s books, YA novels, nonfiction, and poetry), advertising (from early boosterism to Chipotle videos), print culture (farmers’ market and victory garden posters from both world wars), folklore (food culture, vintners, and veterinarian practices), popular culture (Farm Aid concerts), and much more. Each reading is supported by activities, exercises, projects, and visual rhetorical elements that further connect students to agriculture and the essential work of farmers.
 

Joyce Kinkead is distinguished professor of English at Utah State University. She was the 2013 US Professor of the Year for the state of Utah, and is a founding member of the International Writing Centers Association. She was named a Council on Undergraduate Research Fellow in 2012 and is the author or editor of several books.
 
Evelyn Funda is professor of English and associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University and author of the agricultural memoir Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament. She has published extensively on the literature of Willa Cather, and her creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines including Prairie Schooner.
 
Lynne S. McNeill is assistant professor of English in the Folklore Program at Utah State University, cofounder of the Digital Folklore Project, author of Folklore Rules and coeditor of Slender Man Is Coming and Legend Tripping. Her research interests include legend, belief, fandom, and digital folklore.