This dissertation examines the eighteenth-century English georgic in the broader context of the didactic epic. Reading "georgics" through the schema of didactic epic, I provide an alternative trajectory for understanding developments in and experiments with genre during the long eighteenth century. More than swapping parallel terminology my use of didactic epic imports the scholarship of Classical and neo-Latin scholars to reinvigorate a genre hampered by defining the "georgic" as poems about farming, derived exclusively from Virgil's Georgics. Within the framework of didactic epic, I reinterpret peripheral works such as John Gay's Trivia, Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela, and James Grainger's The Sugar Cane claiming these queer, fascinating texts represent critical experimentation with literary form in the eighteenth century. I contend that the incorporation of didactic epic elements into these texts demonstrates the plasticity and persistence of the genre thereby making the study of these foundational English texts and their Classical and neo-Latin sources an integral part of English literary studies. I argue the essays, poems, and novels of Joseph Addison, John Philips, John Gay, Eliza Haywood, and James Grainger dialogue with Classical and neo-Latin poems in addition to Virgil's Georgics such as Manilius's Astronomica, Fracastoro's Syphilis, and more-canonical Classical didactic epics from the Ars Poetica of Horace to Lucretius's De Rerum Natura. Because the separation of didactic and narrative epic derived from reliance on "georgic" has promoted a too-easy separation between the natural world (georgic) and the human world (epic), scholarship has approached English didactic epics as poems that have little bearing on humans and culture. However, analyzing the formal modulations I describe how eighteenth-century texts showcase radical experimentation with narrative persona and polyphonic registers thereby magnifying the presence of human beings in the natural world as organizers and consumers of the landscape and useable land. In the experimentations evident in eighteenth-century English texts, I locate innovations and modulations of the didactic epic that demonstrate the authors variously dissecting and critiquing ideologies of labor and imperialism and offering new paradigms of gender and labor that anticipate modern approaches to literary forms and modern concerns with the interrelation of humans and nature.

Erasmus Darwin’s task as a Deistic Dissenter poet who wished to promote science education to a mixed audience was complex. There was mainstream concern over what Deists and Dissenters actually believed about God, their involvement in science, and, especially, how their published works, whatever the subject, might affect public morality and politics. I argue that Darwin’s poetry is primarily in the genre of Lucretian didactic epic but that it also involves elements of other written traditions (literary and non-literary). I focus on English didactic poetry, the theological written traditions of Dissent and Deism, and a particular tradition of erotic satire. The genre of Lucretian didactic epic and the tradition of English didactic poetry are non-identical. In Darwin’s Lucretian didactic epic, resemblances to such poems as Pope’s Essay on Man challenge ideas about what kind of narrative a didactic poem in the English language can deliver. Techniques from the theological written traditions of Dissent and Deism reflect Darwin’s affiliations, signal that science education fits within a larger debate about intellectual freedom, and promote tolerance for differences of opinion about nature. Mimicry of a particular tradition of erotic satire helps to downplay the address to a mixed audience while satirising some common misconceptions about poetry, botany, and women in the period. Darwin’s poetry challenges ideas about what people from his community of belief meant to communicate or transmit by writing for the general public, what the general public was entitled to learn, and what poetry was able to teach. Perhaps Darwin’s biggest modification of Lucretian didactic epic was that he did not tell his readers exactly what to think, but how. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-07-09 10:04:51.446

The presentation of pietas in Lucretius has often been overlooked since he dismisses all religious practice, but when we consider the poem’s overall theme of growth and decay, a definition for pietas emerges. For humans, pietas is the commitment to maintaining the foedera naturae, “nature’s treaties.” Humans display pietas by procreating and thereby promoting their own atomic movements into the future. In the “Hymn to Venus,” Lucretius uses animals as role models for this aspect of human behavior because they automatically reproduce come spring. In the “Attack on Love,” Lucretius criticizes romantic love because it fails to promote the foedera naturae of the family. Lucretius departs from Epicurus by expressing a concern for the family’s endurance into the future, or for however long natura will allow. It becomes clear that Lucretius sees humans as bound to their communities since they must live together to perpetuate the foedera naturae of the family. / text