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46 results

Page 1 of 3

  • Chapter 13 - Low Lands
  • from Part III - Territories
  • Edited by Paddy Bullard, University of Reading
  • Book: A History of English Georgic Writing
  • Published online: 01 December 2022
  • Print publication: 15 December 2022, pp 275-295
  • View extract

    Summary

    This chapter argues that the East Anglian Fens, a 1,500-square-mile diamond of flat, low-lying land given over largely to agriculture, are a perfect test case for thinking about georgic at the level of landscape. An ancient landscape that seems to forbid organic metaphor, the Fens can seem like perpetually un-reclaimed literary ground. Yet since Caryl Churchill’s Fen (1982) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) contemporary authors have found a more involving territory there than in more conventionally literary landscapes in the Lakes, the Yorkshire Moors or the Wessex uplands. The history of the Fens places often remote and lonely agricultural lives in a setting shaped by mighty human efforts against huge natural forces, especially those of river and sea. In the fens it is easy for georgic writing to lose its human scale. Here both farmer and writer must make a reckoning with everything that the landscape has excluded.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Paddy Bullard, University of Reading
  • Book: A History of English Georgic Writing
  • Published online: 01 December 2022
  • Print publication: 15 December 2022, pp 1-36
  • View extract

    Summary

    This introductory chapter is a headland to the larger field of the history of English georgic writing. It is set aside for a general survey of English georgic viewed through the contexts of agrarian history in the British Isles and of non-literary agricultural writing published over the last five centuries. The aim is to draw out some historical patterns and to fill in some of the literary gaps between chapters. It begins with three contemporary snapshots of British writers demonstrating some of the formal resources the georgic tradition can afford today. Six further sections survey about a century of georgic writing each.

A History of English Georgic Writing
  • A History of English Georgic Writing
  • Edited by Paddy Bullard
  • Published online: 01 December 2022
  • Print publication: 15 December 2022
  • View 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.

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