Rereading the Machine in the Garden : Nature and Technology in American Culture. This item is unavailable.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 by Leo Marx fifty years ago. Contributors 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 the twenty-first century, 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 Marx's study.

Eric Erbacher is a lecturer in American studies at the University of Muenater, Germany Nicole Maruo-Schroder is professor of cultural studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. Florian Sedlmeier is assistant professor of American literature in the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin.