There is a saying: “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
Out of print for decades, and long-since discarded from all but research university libraries, wonderful works of rurally based literature are disappearing every day. Variously called “farm novels,” “regional novels,” or “local color fiction,” these works portray farm life perceptively and in great depth. To lose them is to lose a piece of our collective history; a piece of who we are, as a people and as a nation.
This Rural Literature Initiative seeks strategies for building demand for rural literature in rural and urban schools such that academic/university presses can put this literature back into print or, short of this, that digitized collections might be created.
We ask YOUR help, as an educator, a writer, a reader, or as someone with an interest in preserving Americana in the form of the written word. Please share with us any ideas that you may have for restoring these works to our collective memory and use.
The gradual ascendancy of the “standards movement” in the United States has had an all too predictable standardizing effect in the area of English/language arts. One result of this standardization is that students rarely encounter rural literature in their school experience. As time passes, some of the nation’s best rural literature is gradually slipping into oblivion.
One reason a democracy requires a literate population is so that citizens can maintain the feel of their history, an essential ingredient–according to the Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu–to the success of democracies.
Thank you for your interest – but even more importantly, for YOUR SUPPORT in this critical initiative.
