A History of English Georgic Writing
Published on 26. June 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
401 pages
978-1-009-01129-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'This is a generous and wonderfully varied collection which will re-define the idea of georgic for a new readership. There are broadly two meanings of 'georgic': a didactic poem in the style of Virgil's 'Georgics', and emerging from this especially since the Renaissance, an idea about how to write the rural and the agricultural in an artful and serious way. The essays in this book assuredly cover both meanings, enriching our understanding of georgic, and the contributors find in this genre a valuable lens through which to examine and enrich our understanding of a wide range of literature, from ancient to modern.' John Goodridge, Emeritus Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University '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, DavisMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 151 mm
Width: 228 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
566 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-01129-7 (9781009011297)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Paddy Bullard
A History of English Georgic Writing
Book
12/2022
Cambridge University Press
€134.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Paddy Bullard
A History of English Georgic Writing
E-Book
12/2022
Cambridge University Press
€111.99
Available for download
Person
Paddy Bullard is Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadie, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (2016). With Timothy Michael he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.
Content
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.