Abstract/Summary

A History of English Georgic Writing surveys the literature of rural working lives and landscapes written in English between 1500 and the present day. Written by a team of sixteen subject specialists, it offers a range of scholarly perspectives on the georgic tradition, with insights from literary criticism, historical scholarship, classics, post-colonial studies, rural studies and ecocriticism. The interconnected themes of land and labour were a common recourse for English literary writers between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. In the twenty-first they have become pressing again in the work of nature writers, environmentalists, poets, novelists and dramatists. This volume gives the state of play in georgic literature, criticism and scholarship. It 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.