Book contents
- A History of English Georgic Writing
- A History of English Georgic Writing
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- A Note on National Designations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Turnings
- Part II Times
- Part III Territories
- Chapter 13 Low Lands
- Chapter 14 Between the Georgic and the Pastoral
- Chapter 15 American Georgic
- Chapter 16 Environment and Empire
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 13 - Low Lands
Fen Georgic
from Part III - Territories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2022
- A History of English Georgic Writing
- A History of English Georgic Writing
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- A Note on National Designations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Turnings
- Part II Times
- Part III Territories
- Chapter 13 Low Lands
- Chapter 14 Between the Georgic and the Pastoral
- Chapter 15 American Georgic
- Chapter 16 Environment and Empire
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter argues that the East Anglian Fens, a 1,500-square-mile diamond of flat, low-lying land given over largely to agriculture, are a perfect test case for thinking about georgic at the level of landscape. An ancient landscape that seems to forbid organic metaphor, the Fens can seem like perpetually un-reclaimed literary ground. Yet since Caryl Churchill’s Fen (1982) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) contemporary authors have found a more involving territory there than in more conventionally literary landscapes in the Lakes, the Yorkshire Moors or the Wessex uplands. The history of the Fens places often remote and lonely agricultural lives in a setting shaped by mighty human efforts against huge natural forces, especially those of river and sea. In the fens it is easy for georgic writing to lose its human scale. Here both farmer and writer must make a reckoning with everything that the landscape has excluded.
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- Information
- A History of English Georgic Writing , pp. 275 - 295Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022