Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre

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.

Sue Edney is a lecturer in English at Bristol University, UK, the Reviews Editor for Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism and the ecocriticism representative on the steering committee of the International Ecolinguistics Association.

Tess Somervell is Lecturer in English at Worcester College, University of Oxford, UK, and previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Leeds.