Contents -- Introduction: The Alchemy of Capital and Nature -- Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside? -- The Discourse of Rural Realism -- Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel? -- Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds -- Reference Maps -- PART I: Making Geographies -- 1 Rural Commodity Regimes: A Primer -- The Logics and Illogics of Production: The Shift to and out of Grain -- The Regime of Specialty Crops -- A Wider Division of Labor: The Country in the City -- 2 Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Circulation of Money Capital -- Capitalism and Nature: The Agrarian Nexus -- Axis One: The Mann-Dickinson Thesis, Nature as Obstacle -- Axis Two: Exploiting the Natural Obstacle -- Keeping Capitalism Out or Letting Capital In? Marx on Circulation -- Blurred Boundaries and Fugitive Bodies -- Nature and Circulation -- Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in the United States -- Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in California -- Conclusion: Reading the Landscape of Fictitious Capital -- 3 Toward Rural Realism: Variable Capital, Variable Capitalists, and the Fictions of Capital -- The Way to Get Farm Labor? -- The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 1: Continuity of Wage Labor and Changes in the Wage Labor Market -- The Ever-New, Ever Same, 2: Resistance and Reaction -- Racializing the Working Body and Multicultural Racism -- Toward Rural Realism: An Agrarianism without Illusions? -- Variable Capitalists All: Capitalist Laborers and the Fictions of Capital in Country and City -- Coda: The Labor of Fiction -- PART II: Excavating Geographical Imaginations -- Introduction -- Many Countrysides -- The Trials of Capital and Narratives of Social Space -- The Narrative of Social Space in Rural Realism -- 4 Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism.

The Commodification of Mussel Slough: Railroad, Speculators, and Squatters Converge in the Tulare Basin -- Blood-Money and the Anatomy of Development -- The Country and the City: From Transgression to Similitude -- The Octopus and the Bourgeois Sublime -- Bourgeois Discourse and the Uses of Nature -- 5 Realty Redux: Landscapes of Boom and Bust in Southern California -- Where Is Southern California? -- From Ranchos to Real Estate -- The Boom of the 1880s -- The Southern California Boom Novel -- Conclusion: Production, a Necessary Evil -- 6 Romancing the Sand: Earth-Capital and Desire in the Imperial Valley -- The Problem -- Engineers and Entrepreneurs -- Producing the Imperial Valley -- What a Difference a Flood Makes -- Imperial Valley Representations, 1: Promotion and Its (Dis)Contents -- Imperial Valley Representations, 2: The Winning of Barbara Worth and the Erotics of Western Conquest -- Conclusion: Engineering Rural Realism -- 7 Take Me to the River: Water, Metropolitan Growth, and the Countryside -- Designer Ducts -- Los Angeles and the Owens Valley -- San Francisco and Hetch Hetchy Valley -- Rural Eclipse: The Water-Bearer and The Ford -- Wither Rural Realism? -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.