Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T18:40:21.317Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Farm Horror in the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2020

J. Michelle Coghlan
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access

Summary

From the turn of the twentieth century forward, movie makers, fiction writers, and journalists have increasingly pushed into view bodies mangled by agricultural machinery, workers drowning in silos filled with grain, and lands laden with synthetic toxins. Farms have frequently appeared not only as ideal homesteads near picturesque villages but also as cogs in the brutality of corporate agribusiness, or as isolated and alien outposts struggling for economic survival in depopulated landscapes. The farm has even grown into a privileged setting for stories of supernatural horror bound to the rise of agriculture’s industrialization. Tangled with images of terror and mutilated bodies, Thomas Jefferson’s once idyllic “labor in the earth” now often takes place on a threatening, quasi-industrial, vast and lonely landscape of corn. Texts examined include Frank Norris' The Octopus, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Stephen King’s “The Children of the Corn.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×