Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.
Marx explains his project as an effort “to describe and evaluate the uses of the pastoral idea in the interpretation of American experience.” He traces the pastoral adaptation to the conditions of life in the New World, its emergence as a distinctly American theory of society, and its subsequent transformation under the impact of industrialization. The transformation is from one of the pastoralism of sentiment to the pastoralism of mind. Where pastoralism means the rural, romantic agrarian myth, or the myth of the garden in some cases, pastoralism is the idyllic portrayal of a place away from the city. Pastoralism of the mind comes with industrialization where pastorialism is the transcendental place between city and raw nature (between Rome and the encroaching marshland). Yet the machine or industrialization as represented in the locamotive spoils this arcadia by bursting onto the scene almost from nowhere, forever linking and juxtaposing progress and the reserved eden represented in the pastoral ideal. The machine is more than the urban as opposed to rural; these were georgraphically demarcated and immobile. The machine is technology which transcends the relationship between rural and urban, threating aradia. [L. McReynolds]