A History of English Georgic Writing

A history of English georgic writing – literature focused on working rural lives, landscapes and environments – from 1500 to the present.

Paddy Bullard (Edited by)

9781316519875, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 December 2022

370 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.72 kg

'The English georgic, as this superb collection reveals, provides a vital record of the momentous transformation of rural life, land, and labor over the past five centuries. Yet the essays in Georgic Writing also explore topics that resonate across the georgic's long history, including the inseparability of improvement and degradation, the role of art in conveying or concealing difficult truths, and the arduous work of reshaping a dynamic planet to human ends.' Tobias Menely, Professor of English, The University of California, Davis

The interconnected themes of land and labour were a common recourse for English literary writers between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the twenty-first they have become pressing again in the work of nature writers, environmentalists, poets, novelists and dramatists. Written by a team of sixteen subject specialists, this volume surveys the literature of rural working lives and landscapes written in English between 1500 and the present day, offering a range of scholarly perspectives on the georgic tradition, with insights from literary criticism, historical scholarship, classics, post-colonial studies, rural studies and ecocriticism. Providing an overview of the current scholarship in georgic literature and criticism, this collection argues that the work of people and animals in farming communities, and the land as it is understood through that work, has provided writers in English with one of their most complex and enduring themes.

Part I. Turnings: 1. Hesiod, virgil, and the ambitions of georgic Philip Thibodeau
2. Turning, flying: the rural year Alexandra Harris
3. Farm diaries, 1770–1990 Jeremy Burchardt
4. Twentieth-century georgic and agricultural technology Paul Brassley
Part II. Times: 5. Jacobean georgic Andrew McRae
6. 'Varieties too regular for chance': John Evelyn, John Dryden, and their contemporaries Melissa Schoenberger
7. Enlightenment, improvement and experimentation: Jethro Tull and his contemporaries Frans De Bruyn
8. Georgic, romanticism and complaint: John Clare and his contemporaries Tess Somervell
9. Rural labour in an age of industry: William Cobbett and some contemporaries James Grande
10. Labour isn't working: the (f)ailing georgics of Hardy's wessex novels Andrew Radford
11. Twentieth-century georgic: Vita sackville-west Juan Christian Pellicer
12. Rags and tatters: Hughes, Oswald and their contemporaries Jack Thacker
Part III. Territories: 13. Low lands: Fen georgic Paddy Bullard
14. Between the georgic and the pastoral: the British weald Suzanne Joinson
15. American georgic Sarah Wagner-McCoy
16. Environment and empire: Georgic through time Charlie Kerrigan.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]