Moreover the core of the novel is also the main reference to King Lear by William Shakespeare, in which King Lear wants to divide his country among his three daughters Goneril, Reagan and Cordelia. This is the main event of the novel, everything else is in some way related to it. So, he reacts on her doubts by excluding her from his will and gives the order not to talk about her within the family any longer. Larry is disappointed that Caroline, his favourite daughter, is not as agreeable and grateful as Ginny and Rose. Whereas Ginny and her sister Rose accept the sudden inheritance by their father, Caroline, the youngest daughter shows some doubts. His decision to retire and give his land away is hasty and unplanned. Larry Cook, a farmer, who owns a thousand acres in Zebulon County, mid-west USA, decides to divide his land among his three daughters. The plotĪt the beginning of my work I would like to give a short outline of the novel’s plot. I will try to answer them in the course of my work. How does Jane Smiley describe the results of industrialised farming? Is there any return? How do people cope with agribusiness and its consequences? What is the structure of the society that lives for agribusiness? Is Smiley right, if she calls this way of living Third World-like? These are questions that came up when I read Smiley’s quotation. In this paper I would like to find out how agriculture and farming are represented inĪ Thousand Acres. “ Most people in the business of critiquing agriculture right now are pretty convinced Iowa is the next Alabama – that Third World way of life of tenant farms and big absentee landlords, factories with low-paying jobs in little towns, migrant workers that’s what’s coming, and it’s directly attributable to government policies, to industrial propaganda about how to farm and to university research that has promoted industrialized farming over anything else.” Her critique in this novel points towards industrialised farming and the exploitation of land and its resources. However, A Thousand Acres is not only a rewriting of Shakespeare’s work, it also comments on the social and agricultural circumstances in the United States of the 1960s and 70s, where the novel is set. Jane Smiley rewrote the Shakespearean play King Lear by narrating the story from the eldest daughter’s point of view. The novel was written in 1991 and was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize. In the following seminar paper I am going to write about concepts of ownership in terms of land in the novel A Thousand Acres written by Jane Smiley. Political circumstances or: the settingĤ.
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