Letters From An American Farmer - Structure, Genre and Style

Structure, Genre and Style

Letters from an American Farmer consists of twelve letters that address a wide range of issues concerning life in the British colonies in America in the years prior to the American Revolutionary War. The "Introductory Letter" (Letter I) introduces the fictional narrator James (often critically referred to as 'Farmer James'), an American farmer living in the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. Each Letter takes as its subject matter either a certain topic (Letter III, What is an American?) or a particular location that James visits (Letters IV, VI and IX describe Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Charlestown respectively), though certain themes span or are referred to within several Letters. The exception to this is Letter XI, which is written by a Russian traveler describing his visit to the botanist John Bartram.

The text incorporates a broad range of genres, ranging from documentary on local agricultural practices to sociological observations of the places visited and their inhabitants. Whereas early readings of the text tended to consider it "as a straightforward natural and social history of young America", critics now see it as combining elements of fiction and non-fiction in what Thomas Philbrick has termed a "complex artistry". In addition to its usual classification as form of epistolary, philosophical travel narrative – comparable to Montesquieu's Persian Letters – the text has been considered as a novel, and as a romance.