The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature

The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Author: Ethan Mannon

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024-03-15

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1666944076

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The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat explores environmental writing that foregrounds labor. Ethan Mannon argues that Virgil’s Georgics, as well as the georgic mode in general, exerted considerable influence upon some of America’s best-known writers—including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry—and that these and others worked to revise the mode to better fit their own contexts. This book also outlines the contemporary value of the georgic literary tradition—two thousand years of writing that begins with the premise that humans must use the world in order to survive and search for a balance between human needs and nature’s productive capacity. In the georgic mode, authors found an adaptable discourse that enabled them to advocate for the protection and responsible use of productive lands, present rural places and people in all of their complexity, explore human relationships with laboring animals, and advertise the sensory pleasures of rooted work.


Book Synopsis The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature by : Ethan Mannon

Download or read book The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature written by Ethan Mannon and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat explores environmental writing that foregrounds labor. Ethan Mannon argues that Virgil’s Georgics, as well as the georgic mode in general, exerted considerable influence upon some of America’s best-known writers—including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry—and that these and others worked to revise the mode to better fit their own contexts. This book also outlines the contemporary value of the georgic literary tradition—two thousand years of writing that begins with the premise that humans must use the world in order to survive and search for a balance between human needs and nature’s productive capacity. In the georgic mode, authors found an adaptable discourse that enabled them to advocate for the protection and responsible use of productive lands, present rural places and people in all of their complexity, explore human relationships with laboring animals, and advertise the sensory pleasures of rooted work.

Reading the Earth Workers

Reading the Earth Workers

Author: Ethan Mannon

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This project aims to interweave three threads of discourse--literary studies, agriculture (or agricultural ecology), and ecocriticism--in order to address the critical neglect of georgic spaces and authors by exploring (predominantly agricultural) work and labor in twentieth-century American writing. Although Virgil's Eclogues and the pastoral mode it helped create are more familiar and have attracted far more scholarly attention, this dissertation will argue that the georgic mode--and its fountainhead, Virgil's Georgics--functioned as a vital touchstone for a range of twentieth-century writers. After differentiating the pastoral and georgic modes and establishing the importance of agriculture to several formative environmentalist thinkers, this study takes up its main subjects. The authors of twentieth-century georgics selected for Reading the Earth Workers include canonical figures who cloaked their georgic materials with mantels of pastoralism (Robert Frost and, to a lesser degree, Willa Cather) as well as writers whose blatant focus on agriculture has contributed to their marginalization (Louis Bromfield and Wendell Berry). In an effort to outline the full spectrum of georgic materials generated in the twentieth century, this study ignores the boundaries put in place by genre. That is, Reading the Earth Workers acknowledges that the work of georgic writers includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Finally, this dissertation also challenges anthropocentrism by embracing the importance of nonhuman animals to agriculture, the Georgics, and the georgic mode; thus, the final two chapters collect and analyze the discourse regarding two species of laboring animals--namely, the honey bee and the draft horse.


Book Synopsis Reading the Earth Workers by : Ethan Mannon

Download or read book Reading the Earth Workers written by Ethan Mannon and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This project aims to interweave three threads of discourse--literary studies, agriculture (or agricultural ecology), and ecocriticism--in order to address the critical neglect of georgic spaces and authors by exploring (predominantly agricultural) work and labor in twentieth-century American writing. Although Virgil's Eclogues and the pastoral mode it helped create are more familiar and have attracted far more scholarly attention, this dissertation will argue that the georgic mode--and its fountainhead, Virgil's Georgics--functioned as a vital touchstone for a range of twentieth-century writers. After differentiating the pastoral and georgic modes and establishing the importance of agriculture to several formative environmentalist thinkers, this study takes up its main subjects. The authors of twentieth-century georgics selected for Reading the Earth Workers include canonical figures who cloaked their georgic materials with mantels of pastoralism (Robert Frost and, to a lesser degree, Willa Cather) as well as writers whose blatant focus on agriculture has contributed to their marginalization (Louis Bromfield and Wendell Berry). In an effort to outline the full spectrum of georgic materials generated in the twentieth century, this study ignores the boundaries put in place by genre. That is, Reading the Earth Workers acknowledges that the work of georgic writers includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Finally, this dissertation also challenges anthropocentrism by embracing the importance of nonhuman animals to agriculture, the Georgics, and the georgic mode; thus, the final two chapters collect and analyze the discourse regarding two species of laboring animals--namely, the honey bee and the draft horse.

American Georgics

American Georgics

Author: Timothy Sweet

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-04-19

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0812203186

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In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic. Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the foundational text in the conservationist movement.


Book Synopsis American Georgics by : Timothy Sweet

Download or read book American Georgics written by Timothy Sweet and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic. Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the foundational text in the conservationist movement.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century

Author: Sorrel Kerbel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-11-23

Total Pages: 1716

ISBN-13: 1135456062

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Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.


Book Synopsis The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century by : Sorrel Kerbel

Download or read book The Routledge Encyclopedia of Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century written by Sorrel Kerbel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 1716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Georgic Literature and the Environment

Georgic Literature and the Environment

Author: Sue Edney

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-18

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1000779181

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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.


Book Synopsis Georgic Literature and the Environment by : Sue Edney

Download or read book Georgic Literature and the Environment written by Sue Edney and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Author: A. Mikkelsen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-01-31

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0230117155

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In the first expansive study of American pastoral since Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden , Mikkelsen reinvigorates discussion of this literary mode as a form of cultural commentary whose subjects extend beyond the simple or rustic life to encompass the major social, economic, and political transformations of the past century.


Book Synopsis Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by : A. Mikkelsen

Download or read book Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry written by A. Mikkelsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first expansive study of American pastoral since Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden , Mikkelsen reinvigorates discussion of this literary mode as a form of cultural commentary whose subjects extend beyond the simple or rustic life to encompass the major social, economic, and political transformations of the past century.

Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Author: Christine Gerhardt

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-06-11

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 3110480913

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This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.


Book Synopsis Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century by : Christine Gerhardt

Download or read book Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century written by Christine Gerhardt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Author: Christine Grogan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1611479681

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The first major study to challenge the narrow definition of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by rereading six American literary texts, this book argues for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. This interdisciplinary study traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives published in the last hundred years, from male-authored fiction to female-authored memoir, bringing new readings to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen case. This study builds on the work of those ushering in a second-wave of trauma theory, which has argued that the difficulty of speaking about a traumatic experience is not necessarily caused by neurobiological changes that prevent victims from recalling details. Rather, it’s from social and political repercussions. In other words, they argue that many who experience trauma aren’t unable to deliver accounts; they fear the results. There is a significant gender component to trauma, whose implications, along with those of race and class, have largely gone unexamined in the first-wave of trauma theory. Exploring two additional questions about articulating trauma, this book asks what happens when the voice of trauma is crying out from what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, second, what happens when the trauma is not just a time-limit event but chronic and cumulative experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in American literature. This book is written in part as a response to the psychological community which failed to include complex PTSD in the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5), denying victims, many of whom are father–daughter incest survivors, the validation and recognition they deserve and leaving many misdiagnosed and thereby mistreated.


Book Synopsis Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature by : Christine Grogan

Download or read book Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature written by Christine Grogan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major study to challenge the narrow definition of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by rereading six American literary texts, this book argues for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. This interdisciplinary study traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives published in the last hundred years, from male-authored fiction to female-authored memoir, bringing new readings to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen case. This study builds on the work of those ushering in a second-wave of trauma theory, which has argued that the difficulty of speaking about a traumatic experience is not necessarily caused by neurobiological changes that prevent victims from recalling details. Rather, it’s from social and political repercussions. In other words, they argue that many who experience trauma aren’t unable to deliver accounts; they fear the results. There is a significant gender component to trauma, whose implications, along with those of race and class, have largely gone unexamined in the first-wave of trauma theory. Exploring two additional questions about articulating trauma, this book asks what happens when the voice of trauma is crying out from what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, second, what happens when the trauma is not just a time-limit event but chronic and cumulative experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in American literature. This book is written in part as a response to the psychological community which failed to include complex PTSD in the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5), denying victims, many of whom are father–daughter incest survivors, the validation and recognition they deserve and leaving many misdiagnosed and thereby mistreated.

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature

Author: Matthias Klestil

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-04-20

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 3030821021

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This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten’s journals, Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary tradition that uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.


Book Synopsis Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature by : Matthias Klestil

Download or read book Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature written by Matthias Klestil and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-20 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten’s journals, Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary tradition that uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.

The Georgic Revolution

The Georgic Revolution

Author: Anthony Low

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1400857600

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Low discusses the courtly or aristocratic ideal as the great enemy of the georgic spirit, and shows that georgic powerfully invaded English poetry in the years from 1590 to 1700. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Book Synopsis The Georgic Revolution by : Anthony Low

Download or read book The Georgic Revolution written by Anthony Low and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Low discusses the courtly or aristocratic ideal as the great enemy of the georgic spirit, and shows that georgic powerfully invaded English poetry in the years from 1590 to 1700. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.