Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism

Kevis Goodman is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published articles in Studies in Romanticism, ELH and South Atlantic Quarterly.

• Introduction: Georgic Modernity: sensory media and the affect of history; 1. The Georgics and the cultivation of mediums, 1660–1712; 2. The microscopic eye and the noise of history in Thomson's The Seasons; 3. Cowper's Georgic of the news: the 'loophole' in the retreat; 4. Aural histories in The Excursion: 'Passages of life'.

'It would be difficult, to my mind, to exaggerate the importance of this argument and the book it concludes. By tracing the history of georgic under-presence in eighteenth-century poetry, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism resituates history within literature and finally builds a compelling case for the re-legitimation of Romantic temporality. Kevis Goodman outlines here a genuine history that can live in poetry, and she does so without either denying the value of ideological critique or compromising on the painfulness of historical experience. This work delivers an important qualification to historicism, one that should unsettle some of the assumptions that guide contemporary criticism.' Wordsworth Circle