Rereading the Machine in the Garden ― Nature and Technology in American Culture

This book reexamines the trope of the machine in the garden first laid out in one of the founding texts of American Studies by Leo Marx fifty years ago. The contributors to this volume explore the lasting influence of this concept on American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectic wherein nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. Extending the relevance of Marx’s theory from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, they examine filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; explore its role in the aftermath of the Civil War and of rural electrification during the New Deal; its significance in landscape art as well as in ethnic literatures; and discuss the historical premises and continued impact of Leo Marx’s groundbreaking study.

Eric Erbacher is a lecturer in American studies at the University of Muenster, Germany.Nicole Maruo-Schroder is professor of cultural studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. She is the author ofSpaces and Places in Motion: Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature.Florian Sedlmeier is assistant professor of American literature in the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. He is the author ofThe Postethnic Literary: Reading Paratexts and Transpositions around 2000.