writing

Book

Degraded Heartland: Antipastoral, Agricultural Reform, and the Rural Modern in US Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) is a history of ideas of rural backwardness and inferiority in terms of the antipastoral mode. Antipastoral is a literary mode that responds to the idea that rural America is deficient, backwards, and inferior, even as it insistently dramatizes the modernization of the countryside. The book uncovers neglected links between antipastoral writing by modern writers like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau—and high modernists like Robert Frost, Jean Toomer, and W. E. B. Du Bois—alongside rural and agricultural reformers’ accounts of the suffering of farmers and threats to rural communities.

Editorial

The winner of the ASA prize for the best scholarly essay in the field of American Studies, Maria Farland is the Co-editor of Studies in American Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP / Project Muse). She is committed to promoting academic peer review and the peer reviewed essay as a form. She has published essays on Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, 1970s feminism, and W.E.B. DuBois, in venues like American Quarterly, American Literary History, English Literary History, and American Literature. 

Selected Essays

"Walt Whitman's New York and the Science of Life and Death"

"Gertrude Stein's Brain Work"

"Emily Dickinson's Anti-sentimentality"