Georgic Literature and the Environment

Georgic Literature and the Environment
Author: Sue Edney
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2022-11-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1000779181

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.

American Georgics

American Georgics
Author: Timothy Sweet
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2002-01-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812236378

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 Georgics

The Georgics
Author: Virgil
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1982
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780140444148

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

Georgic Rest and Pastoral Labor

Georgic Rest and Pastoral Labor
Author: Gianina Marie Coturri
Publisher:
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2015
Genre: Clare, John
ISBN:

"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.

The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature

The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Author: Ethan Mannon
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2024-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1666944076

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.

Nature and Literary Studies

Nature and Literary Studies
Author: Peter Remien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 771
Release: 2022-08-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108877877

Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment
Author: Louise Westling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107029929

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

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature

Environmental Practice and Early American Literature
Author: Michael Ziser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107244471

This original and provocative study tells the story of American literary history from the perspective of its environmental context. Weaving together close readings of early American texts with ecological histories of tobacco, potatoes, apples and honey bees, Michael Ziser presents a method for literary criticism that explodes the conceptual distinction between the civilized and natural world. Beginning with the English exploration of Virginia in the sixteenth century, Ziser argues that the settlement of the 'New World' - and the cultivation and exploitation of its bounty - dramatically altered how writers used language to describe the phenomena they encountered on the frontier. Examining the work of Harriot, Grainger, Cooper, Thoreau and others, Ziser reveals how these authors, whether consciously or not, transcribed the vibrant ecology of North America, and the ways that the environment helped codify a uniquely American literary aesthetic of lasting importance.

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature
Author: Matthias Klestil
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2023-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030821021

This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten’s journals, Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary tradition that uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.

Toward a Literary Ecology

Toward a Literary Ecology
Author: Karen E. Waldron
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2013-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810891980

Scholarship of literature and the environment demonstrates myriad understandings of nature and culture. While some work in the field results in approaches that belong in the realm of cultural studies, other scholars have expanded the boundaries of ecocriticism to connect the practice more explicitly to disciplines such as the biological sciences, human geography, or philosophy. Even so, the field of ecocriticism has yet to clearly articulate its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature. In Toward a Literary Ecology: Places and Spaces in American Literature,editors Karen E. Waldron and Robert Friedman have assembled a collection of essays that study the interconnections between literature and the environment to theorize literary ecology. The disciplinary perspectives in these essays allow readers to comprehend places and environments and to represent, express, or strive for that comprehension through literature. Contributors to this volume explore the works of several authors, including Gary Snyder, Karen Tei Yamashita, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Chip Ward, and Mary Oliver. Other essays discuss such topics as urban fiction as a model of literary ecology, the geographies of belonging in the work of Native American poets, and the literary ecology of place in “new” nature writing. Investigating texts for the complex interconnections they represent, Toward a Literary Ecology suggests what such texts might teach us about the interconnections of our own world. This volume also offers a means of analyzing representations of people in places within the realm of an historical, cultural, and geographically bounded yet diverse American literature. Intended for students of literature and ecology, this collection will also appeal to scholars of geography, cultural studies, philosophy, biology, history, anthropology, and other related disciplines.