'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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In Australian ecocriticism, farming is understood as a destructive colonial extraction of wealth that has obliterated the pre-colonial Aboriginal relationship with nonhuman nature. This view is problematic for those seeking to recognise positive changes in farming practices or to develop alternative literary conceptions of farming. This chapter recognises the transmission of Roman culture to Australia by juxtaposing Virgil’s Georgics with three Australian novels and exploring how the georgic mode is registered. A focus on farming practices in Ronald McKie’s The Crushing (1977), Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1946), and John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962) enables an ecocritical reading that counters findings by Shirley McDonald (2015) of British colonists in Canada as practising sustainable agriculture. How Aboriginal characters interact with farming and are excluded from or included in the georgic mode is also discussed. Together these novels depict Aboriginal dispossession and marginalisation, large-scale transformation of pre-existing landscapes, and destruction of coral reefs. This chapter makes use of readings of Virgil’s Georgics as a reflection of Roman imperialism, a scientific text, and a portrayal of chaos and human limits to contribute new understandings of the Australian sugarcane novel and to, perhaps, enable the creation of new versions.'
Source: Abstract.
