Antipastorialism : Resistant Georgic Mode
Abstract
This dissertation contends that the British georgic did not vanish in the late eighteenth-century, but was transformed by unempowered writers into what became a persistent, informing spirit of early Romanticism. Abolitionists, women, Afro-British slaves, and those who protested land enclosure developed a multivalent, resistant mode of writing, which I name 'antipastoralism', that countered orthodox, poetical celebrations of empire and industry. Writers who could neither own land nor gain the benefits of their own labor often labeled themselves and/or their personae explicitly as exiles, mapping their sense of alienation onto a bucolic tradition. Rather than portraying pre-industrial space as savage, authors such as Olaudah Equiano (the first African to write a full-length narrative in English) and anti-slavery poets (from 1787 to 1791) adapt a received georgic theogeny-the story of a golden age spoiled by the curse of labor, a curse that arises both from divine decree and human injustice-into a discourse that represents their displacement from the land. Whereas argumentation in anti-slavery writing is grounded in issues of ownership and a remediation of material conditions, women, who lacked opportunities for proprietorship as well as the hope of legal recourse, conceptualize dispossession differently. The poetry of Charlotte Smith, who was perhaps the most popular female poet of the 1790s, is offered as a case study of how a woman transfers imagery of a threatening environment into a hostile, antipastoralist landscape wherein she envisions her involuntary exile. William Wordsworth's earliest long poems also operate in this resistant georgic mode. In his The Ruined Cottage (1797-99), however, some critics have read his retreat from radical social rhetoric as a displacement of human suffering by an ameliorative ideology.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADA398844
Entities
People
- Donald M. Zimmerman
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology