Georgic Literature And The Environment

This expansive edited collection explores in depth the georgic genre and its connections to the natural world. Together, its chapters demonstrate that georgic—a genre based primarily on two classical poems about farming, Virgil’s Georgics and Hesiod’s Works and Days—has been reworked by writers throughout modern and early modern English-language literary history as a way of thinking about humans’ relationships with the environment. The book is divided into three sections: Defining Georgic, Managing Nature and Eco-Georgic for the Anthropocene. It centres the georgic genre in the ecocritical conversation, giving it equal prominence with pastoral, elegy and lyric as an example of ‘nature writing’ that can speak to urgent environmental questions throughout literary history and up to the present day. It provides an overview of the myriad ways georgic has been reworked in order to address human relationships with the environment, through focused case studies on individual texts and authors, including James Grainger, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Judith Wright and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This is a much-needed volume for literary critics, academics and students engaged in ecocritical studies, environmental humanities and literature, addressing a significantly overlooked environmental literary genre.

In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic. Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the foundational text in the conservationist movement.

The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat explores environmental writing that foregrounds labor. Ethan Mannon argues that Virgil’s Georgics, as well as the georgic mode in general, exerted considerable influence upon some of America’s best-known writers—including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry—and that these and others worked to revise the mode to better fit their own contexts. This book also outlines the contemporary value of the georgic literary tradition—two thousand years of writing that begins with the premise that humans must use the world in order to survive and search for a balance between human needs and nature’s productive capacity. In the georgic mode, authors found an adaptable discourse that enabled them to advocate for the protection and responsible use of productive lands, present rural places and people in all of their complexity, explore human relationships with laboring animals, and advertise the sensory pleasures of rooted work.

This authoritative collection of rigorous but accessible essays investigates the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism.

"Although John Clare, a Romantic era poet, has been lauded as one of the earliest environmental poets, few scholars have identified the specifics of his environmental argument. Clare's position seems obscure not only because his position shifts but also because he draws heavily on pastoral and georgic literature to craft his environmental claims. Clare's complex transformations of georgic and pastoral themes reveal his desire to form what I call a mingled community, one that strives to include humans and non-human nature. Much Clare criticism has examined the same poems, particularly his political poem, "The Mores." My work analyzes this poem but, to create a larger poetic context, I will also examine "Proposals for Building a Cottage" and "The Cottager." The former text evokes georgic poetry, but resembles a pastoral; in contrast, "The Cottager" clearly adheres to georgic poetry, while still utilizing various pastoral elements. The complex relationship these poems have with classical poetry help illuminate "The Mores." Although this poem seems less related to typical pastoral and georgic tropes, its subtle connections embody Clare's environmental argument. After examining "The Mores," which depicts wild nature alongside a human community, I will explore Clare's badger poems. These poems illustrate the mingled community that Clare wishes to build between the natural environment and humans, and establishes his status as an environmental poet. AND In 1903, Mary Wilkins Freeman published a volume of short stories. The stories in Six Trees (1903) revolve around a transformative experience. Freeman inflects all the stories with a strong environmental argument informed by gender that makes her much more of an environmental writer than most scholars have acknowledged. The author argues in each story that people need a connection to nature, whether that is a great pine in the middle of the wilderness or an ornamental poplar in the front yard. Without this connection, people lose track of what is important and begin to overemphasize humanity, forgetting not only that nature has a place in the world but also that nature can promote spiritual enlightenment. Freeman asks her readers to replace outdated and anthropocentric religious models with a more inclusive spiritualty that incorporates nature and emphasizes relationships between humanity and the nonhuman world. I will examine how each story contributes to Freeman's ecofeminist argument. Throughout the collection, the illustrations form a meta-text, one that complicates the main text. By examining the interaction between the text and the illustrations, Freeman's ecofeminism emerges. Ultimately, my analysis of Six Trees will demonstrate Freeman's importance to the environmental canon and early ecofeminism."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

Virgil's classic poem extols the virtues of work, describes the care of crops, trees, animals, and bees, and stresses the importance of moral values

"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--

Goodman traces connections between Georgic verse and developments in other spheres from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

This book synthesizes ecofeminist theory, American studies, and postcolonial theory to interrogate what New Americanist William V. Spanos articulates as the "errand into the wilderness": the ethic of Puritanical expansionism at the heart of the U.S. empire that moved westward under Manifest Destiny to colonize Native Americans, non-whites, women, and the land. The project explores how the legacy of the errand has been articulated by women writers, from the slave narrative to contemporary fiction. Uniting texts across geographical and temporal boundaries, the book constructs a theoretical approach for reading and understanding how women authors craft counter-narratives at the intersection of metaphorical and literal landscapes of colonization. It focuses on literature from the United States and the Caribbean, including the slave narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs, and contemporary work by Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Native American writer Linda Hogan. It charts the contrast between America’s earliest idyllic visions and the subsequent reality: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color and the environment. This study of many canonical writers presents an important and illuminating analysis of American mythologies that continue to impact the cultural landscape today. It will be a significant discussion text for students, scholars, and researchers in environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and postcolonial studies.

This book relocates the long life and literary career of the poet, playwright, novelist, philanthropist and teacher Hannah More (1745-1833) in the wider social and cultural contexts that shaped her, and which she helped shape in turn. One of the most influential writers and campaigners of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, More’s reputation has suffered unfairly from accusations of paternalism and provincialism, and misunderstandings of her sincerely-held but now increasingly unfamiliar evangelical beliefs. Now, in this book, readers can explore a range of essays rooted in up-to-the-minute research which examines newly-recovered archival materials and other evidence in order to present the fullest picture yet of this complex and compelling author, and the era she helped mould with her words.