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.

This is a paper about Canto IV of Lord Byron's long narrative poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It demonstrates the ways in which that poem makes use of both georgic themes and the theories of Catastrophist geology current at the end of the eighteenth century. In short, these two lenses create a mode of poetry in which Byron can view the ruins of Italian culture being consumed by nature in a positive, revolutionary, regenerative light. The paper concludes by contrasting this attitude of Byron's to Victorian attitudes toward ruins in the wake of Uniformitarianism. Readings of the archaeological site at Pompeii, Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," and Darwin's later work demonstrate that late-19th-century scientific georgic cultivates an ethos of preservation and a desire for human agency. / text

This report offers an analysis of the ways in which two eighteenth century georgic poems, John Dyer’s The Fleece and William Cowper’s The Task, mediate evangelical and imperial practices. Through an inquiry into the recent critical intersection between Kevis Goodman’s media focused research into the georgic and Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s similarly inflected inquiry into the Enlightenment, this report suggests that the didactic, agricultural musings of Dyer and Cowper betray a deep engagement the consequences of imperialism and the execution of Britain’s dawning evangelical charge. / text

Virgil's Georgics portray peace and war as disparate states derived from the same fundamental materials. Adopting a didactic tone, the poet uses the language of farming to confront questions about the making of lasting peace in the wake of the Roman civil wars. Rife with subjunctive constructions, the Georgics place no hope in the easily realized peace of a golden age; instead, they teach us that peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Despite this profound engagement with the consequences of civil war, however, the Georgics have not often been studied in relation to English writers working after the civil wars of the 1640s. I propose that we can better understand poems by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Anne Finch, and John Philips--all of whom grappled with the ramifications of war--by reading their work in relation to the georgic peace of Virgil's poem. In distinct ways, these poets question the dominant myth of a renewed golden age; instead, they model peace as a stable yet contingent condition constructed from chaotic materials, and therefore in need of perpetual maintenance. This project contributes to existing debates on genre, classical translation, the relationships between early modern poetry and politics, and most importantly, poetic representations of political and social peace. Recent work has argued for the georgic as a flexible mode rather than a formal genre, yet scholars remain primarily interested in its relation to questions of British national identity, agricultural reform movements, and the production of knowledge in the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century. I argue, however, for the relevance of the georgic to earlier poems written in response to the consequences of the English civil wars. The dissertation includes chapters devoted separately to Marvell, Finch, and Dryden, and concludes with a chapter on how their dynamic conceptions of georgic peace both inform and conflict with aspects of the popular eighteenth-century genre of imitative georgic poetry initiated by Philips and brought to its height by James Thomson. / 2017-05-01T00:00:00Z

Souvent perçu comme le poète de la « nature » par excellence, William Wordsworth serait bien plutôt celui qui a donné définitivement congé à une riche tradition descriptive, puisque les évocations du paysage sont chez lui bien plus rares que chez tous ses prédécesseurs du XVIIIe siècle. Le présent travail se propose de prêter attention à cette raréfaction, qu’on peut également voir, sur le plan de l’histoire esthétique, comme le moment d’émergence d ’une modernité abstraite. La poésie wordsworthienne, qui a pour ambition de refonder le langage et les formes poétiques par un retour à l’authenticité de la nature, apparaît indissociablement comme une rupture avec un mode essentiel de la première modernité anglaise, celui des Géorgiques. Elle prend ainsi acte de la crise de la représentation qui affecte l’optimisme du XVIIIe siècle et qui empêche désormais de voir dans le paysage la manifestation d’ un ordre providentiel. Le « romantisme » anglais est ce qui surgit au défaut de la cosmologie, pour témoigner d’une fondamentale absence au monde. Cette évolution est ici étudiée en deux temps. On s’attachera d’abord à retracer, dans son détail, la trajectoire de la poésie de jeunesse de Wordsworth et de Coleridge, pour montrer que le moment refondateur de Lyrical Ballads intervient au terme d’un épuisement des formes et de la topique qui garantissaient traditionnellement l’intelligibilité du cosmos. Et l’on abordera ensuite trois moments distincts de la maturité poétique de Wordsworth [1798, 1802, 1807], qui suggèrent que le retour de l’idéologie dans son œuvre répond intimement à l’ébranlement radical dans lequel elle trouve son inspiration. / It is remarkable that Wordsworth should still be seen as the quintessential nature poet, when his poetry actually marks the demise of a well-established descriptive tradition in 18th-century English literature: depictions of landscape are much shorter and much less frequent in Wordsworth than in any of his predecessors. The present dissertation explores this paradox, a paradox which in historical and aesthetic terms could be read as heralding a « modern » shift towards abstraction. Wordsworth’s attempt to regenerate the forms and language of poetry through a recovery of « natural » authenticity amounts to a break with the Georgic mode crucial to English early modernity. It stems from the crisis in representation which attended the darkening of 18th-century optimism and meant that landscape could no longer be perceived as evidence of an immanent world-order. Romanticism in Wordsworth registers the default of cosmological discourse. I have tried to analyse this break in a twofold manner. The first part of this dissertation attempts to retrace, through close readings of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s early poetry, the gradual exhaustion of shared or conventional forms and meanings which led to the foundational moment of Lyrical Ballads. The second part, on the other hand, is concerned with Wordsworth’s subsequent evolution and attempts to chart it from three distinct moments [1798, 1802, 1807], suggesting that the poet’s increasing reliance on a conservative ideology is intimately bound up with the earlier, more radical aspects of his work.

This dissertation is an analysis of systematic studies of the land in the early American Republic, from the 1790s to the 1840s; more specifically, it explores the role scientific and technical practices played within that era's improvement ethic. I argue that science, as seen through the lens of agricultural chemistry and, to a lesser extent, geology, became an important, acceptable, and credible way to interact with early Republic land because it fit within the multivalent improvement ethic of that period. Through a study of the agricultural press, farmers’ diaries, and county and statewide scientific surveys, I examine how scientific and technical practices aided agricultural improvement, how they were promoted or resisted by local farmers, and in what ways they gained social credibility for interpreting and interacting with agrarian nature. Part I, “The Place of Science,” explores how science was interpreted by people. I there ask about the social, moral, instrumental, and literary places of agricultural science in rural culture. Part II, “The Science of Place,” asks instead how science interpreted the land, there studying county and state scientific surveys in Virginia. Underlying the entire work is an exposition of the georgic ethic (as distinct from the pastoral ethic), which emphasizes the labor-based means through which most rural peoples understood their land and ties the moral plea for cultural improvement to the material pursuit of agricultural progress. The story herein introduces the production of an important set of conditions that allowed later scientific developments across the land to have meaning and significance: forms of communication, precedents of organization, field-tested modes of analysis, a tradition of improvement and experimentation, the long-standing search for solutions to soil exhaustion, increasingly mechanistic philosophies of soil composition, a market force to drive all of these, and a unique American political and agricultural environment into which the above could take shape. The lesson is not that the entirety of our modern scientific worldview can be traced to the activities of a disgruntled antebellum American farming class, but that this example of rural science and agricultural improvement provides a fruitful example of what it takes to make a scientific worldview. Thus, arguments about philosophical and conceptual bases for scientizing the land–topics of great importance in the fields of environmental history and various branches of science and technology studies–gain strength and plausibility by reference to the workings of antebellum agents who first argued over the value of using science to define their land. By putting the circulation of agricultural science in the context of early Republic improvement-minded agents, we can better locate agrarian American culture into a post-Enlightenment setting, we are better equipped to recognize how everyday citizens came to treat scientific practices as legitimate means of interacting with their lands, and we have a more developed picture of how morality, materiality, and theory were wedded in the much-revered principles of practice and practicality. The sum of those points highlights how traditional means of managing the land, as with religious doctrine, almanac strictures, the lessons inherited through family lineage by generations of daily practice, or uncodified folk knowledge in general, were being complemented with or displaced by organized, methodical, and systematic–eventually, scientific–practices on the land. / Ph. D.

No description available.

During the eighteenth century, the dominant rhetorical and explanatory power of civic humanism was gradually challenged by the rise of a new organising language in political economy. Political economic thought permitted radically different descriptions of what laudable private and public behaviour might be: it proposed that self-interest was often more beneficial to society at large than public-mindedness; that luxury had its uses and might not be a threat to liberty and political integrity; that landownership was no particular guarantee of virtue or disinterest; and that there was nothing inherently superior about frugality and self-sufficiency. These new ideas about civil society formed the intellectual basis of a large body of verse written during the long eighteenth century (at mid-century in particular), in which poets engaged enthusiastically with political economic arguments and defences of commercial activity, and celebrated the wealth and plenty of Britain as a modern trading nation. The work of my thesis is to examine a contradiction in the way in which these political economic ideas were handled. Forward-looking and confident poetry on public themes did not develop pioneering forms to suit the modernity of its outlook: instead, poets articulated such themes in verse by appropriating and reframing traditional genres, which in some cases involved engaging with inherited moral values and philosophical preferences entirely at odds with the intellectual material in hand. This inventive kind of generic revision is the central interest of the thesis. It aims to describe a number of problematic meeting points between new political economic thought and handed-down poetic formulae, and it will focus attention on some of the ways in which poets manipulated the forms and tropes they inherited in order to manage – and make the most of – the resulting contradictions.