A History of English Georgic Writing

Paddy Bullard is Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019). With James McLaverty he co-edited Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and, with Alexis Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe (2016). With Timothy Michael he is co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope.

• Part I. Turnings: 1. Hesiod, virgil, and the ambitions of georgic Philip Thibodeau; 2. Turning, flying: the rural year Alexandra Harris; 3. Farm diaries, 1770–1990 Jeremy Burchardt; 4. Twentieth-century georgic and agricultural technology Paul Brassley; Part II. Times: 5. Jacobean georgic Andrew McRae; 6. 'Varieties too regular for chance': John Evelyn, John Dryden, and their contemporaries Melissa Schoenberger; 7. Enlightenment, improvement and experimentation: Jethro Tull and his contemporaries Frans De Bruyn; 8. Georgic, romanticism and complaint: John Clare and his contemporaries Tess Somervell; 9. Rural labour in an age of industry: William Cobbett and some contemporaries James Grande; 10. Labour isn't working: the (f)ailing georgics of Hardy's wessex novels Andrew Radford; 11. Twentieth-century georgic: Vita sackville-west Juan Christian Pellicer; 12. Rags and tatters: Hughes, Oswald and their contemporaries Jack Thacker; Part III. Territories: 13. Low lands: Fen georgic Paddy Bullard; 14. Between the georgic and the pastoral: the British weald Suzanne Joinson; 15. American georgic Sarah Wagner-McCoy; 16. Environment and empire: Georgic through time Charlie Kerrigan.

'This is a generous and wonderfully varied collection which will re-define the idea of georgic for a new readership. There are broadly two meanings of 'georgic': a didactic poem in the style of Virgil's 'Georgics', and emerging from this especially since the Renaissance, an idea about how to write the rural and the agricultural in an artful and serious way. The essays in this book assuredly cover both meanings, enriching our understanding of georgic, and the contributors find in this genre a valuable lens through which to examine and enrich our understanding of a wide range of literature, from ancient to modern.' John Goodridge, Emeritus Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University