A01=Ted Atkinson
Author_Ted Atkinson
Category=JBCT
Category=JHB
Category=KCS
documentary films
economic rehabilitation
Elia Kazan
energy production
environment climate change
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Federal Theatre Project
flood control
fossil fuel consumption
Great Depression
living newspapers
Long Man
modernization
New Deal
photography
regionalism
reservoirs hydroelectric power
Robert Penn Warren
strip mining
The River
TVA agenda
Wild River
Product details
- ISBN 9781496859259
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2025
- Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Established by Congress as part of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) designated parts of seven southern states for economic rehabilitation through various means, including flood control, rural electrification, and social programs. The goal was to deploy federal resources to reshape the region through infrastructure—mainly a network of hydroelectric dams. To garner political and public support, TVA officials mobilized artists. Soon state-sponsored cultural productions emerged, resulting in a body of work comprising an array of mediums. The TVA swayed public opinion and generated positive reviews at the outset because of the vital role that culture played in making public meaning, particularly regarding the near-total transformation of the Tennessee Valley through infrastructural development as part of a larger ideological and economic investment in public works. While the content was geared toward promoting the TVA agenda, aesthetic innovations had a lasting impact, influencing subsequent generations of artists who portrayed the TVA enterprise with complexity, nuance, and depth. At a time when the country is grappling with issues surrounding climate change, fossil fuels consumption, and strip mining, the TVA now struggles to balance its reputation for prosperity and development with public suspicion and skepticism.
In Monumental Designs: Infrastructure and the Culture of the Tennessee Valley Authority, author Ted Atkinson presents a cultural history of the TVA that examines representations of the agency in selected works from the New Deal era to the present. With chapters organized according to medium—photography and photobooks, documentary films, New Deal theater, fiction film, and novels—Monumental Designs seeks to illuminate the entwined forms of infrastructural development and cultural production that have made the TVA a source of multivalent power and influence. This examination of cultural history intends to foster critical thinking about how public works can come to be regarded as monumental expressions of national purpose and modern engines of progress defined in terms of perpetual growth and development.
In Monumental Designs: Infrastructure and the Culture of the Tennessee Valley Authority, author Ted Atkinson presents a cultural history of the TVA that examines representations of the agency in selected works from the New Deal era to the present. With chapters organized according to medium—photography and photobooks, documentary films, New Deal theater, fiction film, and novels—Monumental Designs seeks to illuminate the entwined forms of infrastructural development and cultural production that have made the TVA a source of multivalent power and influence. This examination of cultural history intends to foster critical thinking about how public works can come to be regarded as monumental expressions of national purpose and modern engines of progress defined in terms of perpetual growth and development.
Ted Atkinson is associate professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is editor of Mississippi Quarterly and author of Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics.
