Monumental Designs: Infrastructure and the Culture of the Tennessee Valley Authority

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Ted Atkinson

Monumental Designs

Infrastructure and the Culture of the Tennessee Valley Authority

Ted Atkinson

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English

University Press of Mississippi
15 October 2025

Media studies; Sociology; Economic systems & structures

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.

By: Ted Atkinson
Imprint: University Press of Mississippi
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781496859259
ISBN 10: 1496859251
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 15 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Monumental Designs: Infrastructure and the Culture of the Tennessee Valley Authority

Deftly combining critical theory, history, and literary/film analysis, Atkinson's Monumental Designs helps us understand the importance of interrogating the ideological underpinnings of infrastructure, something that is of the utmost importance in the present moment as we decide how to best respond to climate change.--Matthew M. Lambert, author of The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s