2021 Vol.12 Num.2 Wholeissue

Author: Sullivan, Heather I. Title: Editorial 12.
Editorial 12.2
Heather I. Sullivan
Trinity University, USA
[email protected]
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2021.12.2.4544
In light of the Anthropocene’s industrial agriculture based on petroleum products,

toxic chemicals, deforestation, and factory farms, one might be tempted to describe
human cultivation primarily as destructive. There are, of course, many other ways of
practicing agriculture and of thinking about the human being’s food systems ecologically,
and other strategies for interactions with our living world beyond anthropocentric
exploitation, dominance, or efforts to control while all-too-often wreaking havoc. In
particular, I note Robin Wall Kimmerer’s discussion of Indigenous practices in her 2013
book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of
Plants, which combines the insights of Native Americans with scientific botany in order to
describe long-term and productive collaborations among human, plants, and the non-
human or more-than human broadly. Kimmerer makes clear that the titular sweetgrass
best thrives when interacting with human beings, a fact in direct contrast to the expected
scientific assumption that any human interference would be negative. She found the
opposite to be true: the scientists’ “predictions for sweetgrass were consistent with their
Western science worldview, which sets human beings outside of ‘nature’ and judges their
interactions with other species as largely negative. They had been schooled that the best
way to protect a dwindling species was to leave it alone and keep people away. But the
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grassy meadows tell us that for sweetgrass, human beings are part of the system, a vital
part” (Kimmerer 163). Indeed, Kimmerer uses the fact of human-sweetgrass
collaboration such that both species best survive together as the framework for the entire
book, which nevertheless does not shy away from documenting extreme pollution,
extinctions, and misunderstandings of other living things. Collaboration is a possibility,
she writes, and not just for bees and flowers: “With a long, long history of cultural use,
sweetgrass has apparently become dependent on humans to create the “disturbance” that
stimulates its compensatory growth. Humans participate in a symbiosis in which
sweetgrass provides its fragrant blades to the people and people” (Kimmerer 164). Active
collaboration is the basis of such relationships, as we see in so many plant-animal or plant-
human interactions such as fruit production and dissemination, and even in the face of
the struggle and labor necessary to maintain these living relationships. Other recent
authors similarly consider agricultural methods that are not based on short-term profit
and the neglect of our own ecological dependency, seeking especially sustainable options
that produce at the large-scale now necessary to feed our current human population.
Mark Bittmann, journalist and cookbook author extraordinaire, for example, writes in his
2021 book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food from Sustainable to Suicidal, of
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Author: Sullivan, Heather I. Title: Editorial 12.2
“agroecology” as another kind of collaboration that simultaneously enriches humans, the

living soil, and the other living things dependent on the land around farms. He writes:
“The word ‘agroecology’ was first used about a hundred years ago, and it remains the best
descriptor for the movements that are rebuilding our relationship with food” (Bittmann
314). In his definition, Bittmann emphasizes the ecological health of this system:
“agroecology is a set of practices that integrates ecological principles into agriculture. As
a scientific approach to farming that works with all of nature’s power and gifts, rather
than seeing nature as something to be conquered, it stands in opposition to industrial
agriculture. It is more serious and comprehensive than ‘organic,’ and not constrained by
USDA definitions” (Bittmann 315). Such a practice emphasizes social justice, cuts back on
use of toxic chemicals in fertilizer and pesticides, and focuses on sustaining people, soil,
and plants: “Agroecology regenerates the ecology of the soil instead of depleting it,
reduces carbon emissions, and sustains local food cultures, businesses, farms, jobs, seeds,
and people instead of diminishing or destroying them” (Bittmann 317). Bittmann’s book
offers a broad ranging history of human agriculture with horrific descriptions of its use to
dominate. and enslave, and its destruction of ecological systems, yet he ends with hopeful
documentation of actual farms now undertaking successful efforts at agroecology with
the potential for large-scale production.
The quest for literary expressions of such efforts describing more sustainable and
collaborative agricultural practices in the Anthropocene reveals a wide array of options,
not all good. For example, in the early Anthropocene—if we accept the industrial
revolution as this era’s starting point—Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s famously idyllic sense
of farms fill his 1796-97 epic, Hermann and Dorothea, in which lavish fields, lovely
gardens, and ripening fruit trees exist in peaceful and luxurious contrast to the violence
of the French Revolution, or his best-selling international hit of sentimental literature
from 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which Werther declares his wish to be like a
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maybug flitting joyously among the peaceful plants. Yet those texts both express primarily
the longing for a kind of pastoral harmony without much sense of the actual labor of
working with the land despite the massive floods. The Austrian Adalbert Stifter’s mid-
nineteenth-century novella Brigitte from 1844, in contrast, dedicates extensive attention
specifically to the never-ending work necessary for farming in the steppes of Eastern
Europe, part of what is now Hungary, but the narrative primarily concentrates on the
anthropocentric control and re-shaping of the land by draining swamps and cutting trees
to improve it for human use. In the twentieth century, many postcolonial novels present
farm labor instead as a means of attaining freedom and independence from colonial rule
such as Bessie Head’s exemplary 1968 novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, that takes place in
Botswana and celebrates the potential of cash crops. Despite the compelling story of hope
and the promise of intense labor for farmers, even female farmers, to make their own way,
cash crops tend to immerse farmers in the large-scale banking-heavy equipment-
pesticides-seeds-cycles of debt including starvation, as explained at length in both
Bittmann’s book and Vandana Shiva’s works, Stolen Harvest (2000) and Soil Not Oil
(2009).
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In contrast to these works written during the Anthropocene, the special section in
this volume of Ecozon@ turns quite productively to a much older literary tradition from
antiquity as inspiration for reconsidering historical agricultural practices that feature
actual labour instead of idylls or future dreams: the georgic mode. Inspired especially by
Virgil’s Georgics (29 BC), our guest editors of Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the
Anthropocene, Philipp Erchinger, Sue Edney, and Pippa Marland, describe both ancient
and new forms of the georgic in which grappling with nature in order to develop
agriculture involves serious, ongoing work and, potentially, a less anthropocentric
perspective. Growing food means engaging with the natural world and thus struggling
with storms, pests, and predators, rather than the idyllic peace of pastoral fields or the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century sense of human control and profit. Above all, the
editors promote the georgic mode as a frame positing the ongoing labour as inherently
ecological if not necessarily environmentally positive: “the georgic world is always in
excess of, or out of tune with, people’s endeavours to work in consonance with it. This
georgic imbalance of human labour and its surrounding medium entails an ecology,
according to which forms of disequilibrium and inadequacy are an unavoidable part of all
our efforts to make ourselves at home in the earthly world.” Finding labour, the work of
care, to be at the core of the many depictions of Virgil’s work, the editors suggest that new
forms of georgic from many eras up through contemporary texts provide promising
models of human interactions—even collaborations—with the natural world. These
perspectives are especially pertinent in the many crises and ambiguities of human-non-
human interactions in the Anthropocene: “The georgic is relevant today, we want to
suggest, because it shows us that such local care for and about the earth can take various,
often contradictory forms. Being about ‘intervening in nature’ rather than ‘about admiring
nature,’ as Laura Sayre points out, the georgic is deeply aware of the compromises and
mistakes that are an inevitable part of all such intervention.” The eight essays in the
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section demonstrate a wide array of possible forms of the “New” or “Eco” Georgic,
exploring examples ranging from Virgil’s idea of land, Mushrooms in Irish poetry, Wendell
Berry’s “Mad Farmer,” a Victorian Eco-Georgic, Georgian Georgic in the Modernist
Moment and Beyond, an Ecofeminist Revolution of the Georgics from Suzanne Verdier to
Anna Barbauld, to Cynan Jones’s twenty-first century portrayal of Welsh farming. Besides
inspiring new readings of texts from antiquity through today, Erchinger’s, Edney’s and
Marland’s introduction and the essays in the special section offer important insights into
existing examples of alternative human-non-human interactions for producing food, as
well as an exemplary demonstration of how literary works and non-fiction both can
broaden and historicize current cultural discussions of land-use in the Anthropocene.
The general section of this volume includes three essays which also highlight old
and new approaches to ecological practices, but here in terms of different media. These
essays nicely complement the special section’s attention to the challenge and labour of
revising perspectives on human-non-human relations by expanding the type of texts
considered, including an eco-noir television crime series, gaming, and new nature writing
utilizing the new materialisms. The first essay, Helen Mäntymäki’s essay, “Polar Bear in
Fortitude. Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Change” insightfully dismantles
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simplistic responses to the challenge of changing human actions and attitudes about non-
human lives. Studying the first season of the television Eco Noir crime series Fortitude
(2015) and its depiction of the polar bear so typically associated with images of global
warming, Mäntymäki addresses two discourses relating to the bears: “The first one relates
to violence, essentially present in crime narratives, and how the human and nonhuman
animal are positioned in relation to global warming, violence and each other.” But the
second discourse, she notes, is a more complex process in which “human animals looking
at photographs of bears both constructs and deconstructs the subject-object relation,
hierarchy and agency.” In other words, the bears become “sticky objects” as violent
predators and, simultaneously, as victims of human violence, and the “charged
representation of the polar bear evokes ambiguous affective responses in viewers” as per
affect theory. The complexity and ambiguity, Mäntymäki asserts, have more of an impact
towards understanding human-animal interactions than, say, simpler images evoking
merely pity or fear. Indeed, her essay’s focus on portrayals of the iconic polar bear, like
the Eco-Georgic work in the special section, offers noteworthy emphasis of art’s and
narrative’s ability to produce affect in more complex and impactful ways than simple
environmental messaging.
In “Materality, Responsibility and Anthropocene: Thought in Robert Macfarlane’s
and Kathleen Jamie’s Nature Writing,” Iris Zechner, like the special section on the Eco
Georgic, also productively discusses updates of older forms, in this case of nature writing.
She contextualizes her study of the “New Nature Writing” in terms of the Anthropocene
debate regarding the extreme impact of human beings on the earthly ecosystems in
contrast to the new materialisms’ “post-humanist” focus on placing human agency in the
context of other, larger agential forces both living and geological. Zechner defends the new
materialisms against Clive Hamilton’s critique of posthumanism that diminishes, in his
view, the significance of human power thus possibly overlooking our responsibility. In
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contrast to Hamilton, Zechner suggests “a reading of the new materialisms as a way of
endorsing respect for the Earth System that we co-inhabit with various other matters, a
respect that implies an invitation to act with caution and care. It is exactly this invitation
that we can find in the NNW, too.” Of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and its treatment, for
example, of fungal networks, Zechner therefore sees an “intimacy towards nonhuman
matters that emphatically illustrates their intrinsic value.” The second part of the essay
considers the new materialist stance of Kathleen Jamie’s collections of naturalist essays,
and reveals how Jamie “nevertheless question[s] the implications of this ontological
framework, in particular with regard to ethics and human responsibility in times of the
Anthropocene.” That is, Jamie raises the highly relevant question of the precise actions we
could and would actually undertake in the Anthropocene that could truly make a
difference on the scale necessary to shift climate change.
Finally, Lykke Guanio-Uluru’s “Embodying Environmental Relationship: A
Comparative Ecocritical Analysis of Journey and Unravel” studies the ecological aspects of
the games Journey and Unravel, with particular attention to the player’s experience of
embodiment in vibrant landscapes that combine natural and cultural features as puzzles
to navigate. Building on John Parham’s ground-breaking work in Green Media and Popular
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Culture: An Introduction (2016), Guanio-Uluru highlights how the player is confronted

with an agential landscape in Journey while existing as a figure without hands to
manipulate its world so that it can only sense it: “Since the avatar lacks arms, the player
can only interact with the landscape by moving through it, feeling and seeing the effects
of the wind, sand and sun,” which means that the player functions less as an agent than as
“the receiver of an at times agential landscape.” Of Unravel, Guanio-Uluru describes a
similar “bodily” and immersive experience such that: “A lot of the enjoyment in Unravel
comes from moving around in and experiencing the beautifully rendered landscapes of
the game world, which are naturalistic representations of the Swedish countryside, from
Yarny’s perspective.” In other words, playing these games engages a new kind of
awareness that is ecological in its altered sense of labour necessary to proceed through
the active and forceful energy of either the Swedish landscape or the sand and wind
actively shaping the player’s progress.
This issue’s Creative Writing and Arts section then provides inspiring examples of
the New, or Eco Georgic with its vibrant poetry and art works. As the section editor,
Damiano Benvegnù opens the section with a brief foray into messy, untended North
Eastern United States forests that still show the massive human impact from previous
years in contrast to well-tended forests of Italy, that are “agro-pastoral cultures” which
“are accustomed to view and interact with forests in terms of intergenerational
obligation.” Benvegnù thus leads us into the stunning, post-pastoral images and poetry of
the section with intense focus on responsible interactions through ongoing labour, or to
borrow again from Kimmerer, collaborations.
Finally, the seven book reviews in this volume address some of the major threads
in the environmental humanities today, including postcolonial ecocriticism of the Global
South and of Indigenous voices; reconsiderations of Nature Writing and Nature Essays;
Climate-Change poetics and aesthetics; Ecosemiotics; and Famine Studies.
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Works Cited
Bittman, Mark. Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Die Leiden des jungen Werther, edited by Waltraud Wiethölter.
Klassiker, vol. 8, 1985 (1774), pp. 10-267.
---. Hermann und Dorothea, edited by Waltraud Wiethölter. Klassiker, vol. 8, 1985 (1796-
97), pp. 807-883.
Hamilton, Clive. Defiant Earth. Polity Press, 2017.
Head, Bessie. When Rain Clouds Gather. 1969. Heinemann, 1995.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and
the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Parham, John. Green Media and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Palgrave, 2016.
Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest. The University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
---. Soil Not Oil. Zed Books, 2009.
Stifter, Adalert. Brigitta. 1844. Winkler, 1990.
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Author: Erchinger, Philipp, Sue Edney and Pippa Marland Title: Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the
Anthropocene. An Introduction
Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene

An Introduction
Philipp Erchinger
University of Düsseldorf, Germany
[email protected]
Sue Edney
University of Bristol, UK
[email protected]
Pippa Marland
University of Bristol, UK
[email protected]
Towards Care: Georgic Ecology
Georgic literature, which reaches back to Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 BC) and
Virgil’s Georgics (29 BC) and has remained influential ever since, used to be specifically
about farm labour and husbandry, about growing crops and keeping animals. In the
modern world, its focus widened to include the production and trade of goods more
generally. But, whatever its specific theme, throughout its long and varied history, georgic
writing has always been concerned with a question that continues to be at the heart of
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our human existence: How should we work to cultivate a fertile and sustainable
relationship with our physical and social environment? How, in other words, are we
supposed to live well? All the answers that georgic writing, whether it is meant to be
didactic or not, gives to this question are typically premised on the assumption that the
struggle with recalcitrant matters and unforeseeable adversities is an inescapable part of
human life. Rather than offering fictions of a golden world, as its concomitant genre,
pastoral is often said to do, georgic responds to an experience of living in what the
eighteenth-century poet James Thomson, in The Seasons (1730), called “iron times” (10,
l.274). These are times, as he specifies, when “Nature disturbed / Is deemed, vindictive,
to have changed her course”, being no longer perceived as peaceful and fecund but as
tumultuous and unpredictable (11, ll. 307-8). As the ambiguity in Thomson’s line-break
suggests, the disturbance of nature mentioned here is as much a condition of the physical
world as it is a product of human thought or feeling: of a “distempered mind”, as the
speaker says a little earlier, that “Has lost that concord of harmonious powers / Which
forms the soul of happiness” (10, ll.275-7).
The “iron times” with which the georgic has always engaged, then, are
characterised by “a crisis of nature” that, as David Fairer puts it in a seminal article on
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georgic ecology, is “a symptom of a more fundamental crisis of humanity” (“Where

Fuming” 201). In georgic literature, more specifically, the human way of being tends to
run into difficulties because it is both part of and different from the natural world.
Simultaneously dependent on and abstracted from the earthly ground of their existence,
human beings, the georgic suggests, constantly have to make decisions about which life
they prefer to lead (Plessner 287). They must learn to subsist in the midst of a material
world that does not necessarily (or naturally) accord with their wishes and needs. One
key concern of georgic writing, therefore, is the experience of living in an environment
that is not, as William Wordsworth imagines it, “exquisitely […] fitted to the mind” (198,
ll.1009-11). Rather, the georgic world is always potentially in excess of, or out of tune
with, people’s work of making it habitable and fruitful.
This georgic imbalance of human labour and its surrounding medium entails an
ecology, according to which forms of disequilibrium and inadequacy are an unavoidable
part of all our efforts to make ourselves at home in the earthly world. In a georgic
landscape, inhabitants are continually challenged to adjust their behaviour to changes in
the weather, the soil, or other circumstantial affairs. In Virgil’s Georgics, for example,
human activities of cultivation and construction are repeatedly threatened with being
overrun or swept away by the very elements and forces, such as storms or pests, through
and with which they exist. This is “the way it is”, as Virgil’s speaker emphasises in a famous
passage:
world forces all things to the bad, to founder and to fall,
just as a paddler in his cot struggling to make headway up a
river,
if he lets up a minute, will find himself
rushed headlong back between the banks. (1:299-303, Fallon)
To sustain our existence, this comparison suggests, we humans have to work as much with
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nature as we are compelled to emancipate ourselves from it. We can use its powers and
resources only if we know how to direct and cooperate with them.
Deeply interested in this art or skill of adapting natural resources to human
purposes, georgic writing may easily be dismissed as being complicit in anthropocentric
ideologies of cultural advancement that rely on the (often ruthless) mastery and
exploitation of the earth. No doubt, it is likely that the resurgence of georgic in modern
literature owed something to such ideologies. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
centuries georgic superseded the “youthful innocence” of pastoral, gaining prevalence as
“a grown-up poetry for an age that was becoming busier and wealthier, and a nation that
was concerned with how to handle progress” (Fairer, “Georgic” 466; Fowler 84). But
although many georgic texts certainly participated in the consolidation of a global market
for consumer goods, they often emphasise that we humans will improve (in all senses of
the term) our relationship with the natural world only if we learn how to take care of and
attend to its various local peculiarities, too. In John Dyer’s The Fleece, for example, a
georgic poem about sheep farming and wool industry, the speaker advises the “gentle
shepherd”, who faces the task of looking after a newly born lamb, that his “care” should
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be “lenient” and tender (25, ll.410-12). “O guard his meek sweet innocence from all / Th’
innum’rous ills, that rush around his life”, he cries emphatically:
Mark the quick kite, with beak and talons prone
Circling the skies to snatch him from the plain;
Observe the lurking crows; beware the brake,
There the sly fox the careless minute waits;
Nor trust thy neighbour’s dog, nor earth, nor sky:
Thy bosom to a thousand cares divide. (26, ll.418-25)
In the environment of the georgic every detail must be watched and cared about because
nothing, not even earth or sky, can be trusted to conform to our expectations and desires.
In such an environment, the mutual correspondence between humans and the material
world that sustains them cannot be taken for granted. Instead, that correspondence must
be actively and persistently, often laboriously created and maintained: by following or
resisting the currents of physical power, or by tending to certain vegetables or animals
while warding off (or even combating) others.
We have already mentioned that this necessity to be vigilant and attentive implies
an ecology of the human that calculates with the incalculable and contingent as inherent
to the way we lead our lives. We can now add that the georgic also suggests a concomitant
anthropology: a conception of the human as a kind of being that can exist in or focus on a
single place only by potentially thinking, as Dyer’s shepherd, of multiple others at the
same time. In this view, human beings are, at every moment of their lives, divided “to a
thousand” possible “cares” or concerns, lacking a natural centre or ground. Hence the
constant pressure to weigh options and make choices, each of which could be made
otherwise. It is the art or skill of making such choices, with which the georgic has
traditionally been concerned: the practical knowledge of when, where and how to sow
which grains, how to prevent sheep from catching diseases, or to remove a twig from one
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tree and engraft it upon another.
Being an eminently practical genre, georgic does not, therefore, typically represent
or invoke Nature as an ideal of wholeness, equivalent, as in much Romantic literature, to
a quasi-divine agency or spirit, “something far more deeply interfused” that, to quote
Wordsworth again, “rolls through all things”, including the human mind (“Lines” 196,
ll.97-103). In georgic writing, nature rather features as a “mixed economy” (Fairer,
“Where Fuming” 205), a gathering of multiple, changeable forces, materials, species, and
types of growth, each of which exerts different demands on the farmer or worker. Unlike
a pastoral idyll, moreover, nature, in such writing, does not primarily function as a source
of comfort and healing, or a place of sentimental longing representative of what a person
or society feels to be lacking or lost. Instead, georgic nature exists as a series of useful
tasks, a field of practical experience and trial, in which established wisdom remains
subject to being corrected or modified in response to disruptive incidents or unforeseen
events. Knowledge, in this field, is provisional and tentative, a matter of incremental steps,
unable to supply final answers or guiding visions of a future world.
But are such final answers or guiding visions not exactly what we now need in
order to come to grips with an environmental crisis that is becoming increasingly urgent?
Or why else should readers want to turn to the ancient genre of the georgic today? As
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Richard Kerridge has pointed out, the idea of a single “revelatory, unifying and saving”
insight, may certainly seem attractive in the face of a massive, convoluted problem such
as global warming, in which physical, geographical, economic, political, and cultural issues
are inextricably tangled up with each other (5). But to implement practically this sort of
insight in people’s day-to-day lives would require a jump of scale that, as Timothy Clark
and Bruno Latour have shown, is impossible to conceive. Noone can save the planet by
buying an energy-saving washing machine (Clark, Latour). Kerridge therefore suggests
that a more promising and realistic way to approach the contemporary climate crisis is to
deal with and think about it not in terms of a global revolution but in terms of locally
exercised “care” (5). According to the OED, “care” encompasses feelings of concern or
interest as well as acts of nurture, protection, or attention. The more people care about
something, the more likely they are to care for, or take care of it too.
The georgic is relevant today, we want to suggest, because it shows us that such
local care for and about the earth can take various, often contradictory forms. Being about
“intervening in nature” rather than “about admiring nature”, as Laura Sayre points out,
the georgic is deeply aware of the compromises and mistakes that are an inevitable part
of all such intervention (195). Therefore, the genre constantly emphasises the necessity
of being mindful and circumspect. A shepherd, as the example from Dyer’s The Fleece
suggests, cares as much about the lamb he seeks to rear as he cares about the fox that he
hopes to keep at bay. Indeed, the shepherd or farmer with his multiple daily concerns is
perhaps not the worst model for a way of caring that is not, in Kerridge’s words, limited
to particular social and psychological spheres, but “spreads throughout our working lives,
home lives, recreational lives and political lives, making a difference” (6). Those who, in
one way or another, care about the animate and inanimate world that sustains their lives,
one may hope, will sooner or later behave differently towards that world too, even if their
thinking has not been converted radically or absolutely. Having established prudent
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action and practical care as central components of a georgic ecology, we can now take a
more detailed look at the most influential foundational text of the georgic tradition:
Virgil’s Georgics. A final section of this introduction will then show how recent writers
have taken up the georgic tradition in the context of the Anthropocene.
Virgil’s Georgics
It might be asked why Virgil’s Georgics offer any kind of a model for sustainable
engagement with land, given that the period and the circumstances in which they were
written are some 2000 years distanced from our own. Virgil’s patron, Gaius Maecenas was
an advisor to Emperor Octavian, later Augustus, and a powerful influence at court and in
the working lives of Rome’s artists; he commissioned the Georgics on behalf of Octavian
in 37 BCE, completed eight years later. This renders the poem a political as well as an
artistic gift for the emperor. Virgil’s own province, Mantua had its lands redistributed
among war veterans, like so many estates in Northern Italy, after Mark Antony’s victory
over Julius Caesar’s enemies at Philippi. Octavian faced resistance for what was, in effect,
a way of keeping military leaders quiet during a transition period from civil war to relative
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stability under Augustus, and Virgil’s discomfort with the resulting land grab underlies
his writing, in the Eclogues as well as the Georgics. There are nagging questions at the
heart of each book: is it possible to manage nature, an active, living, fluctuating thing? Are
the results of unrelenting effort worthwhile, when poverty and disease are as likely
outcomes as “the best of olives spilling from the mills” (2: 519, Fallon)? And the difference
between cultivating land that is owned and land that is worked by others creates further
questions, about appropriation, for example, and alienation from participating in the
benefits of working with and alongside the nonhuman—who is permitted to ‘enjoy’ the
land; who benefits from its gifts? Yet between Virgil’s paeans to Octavian—whom he
reveres not just as an arbiter of his own destiny but someone who can manipulate the
world’s fortunes—and grim tales of plague, extreme weather, war and human
recklessness we find stories of kinship and reciprocity that redeem human and nonhuman
misery. Italian landscapes from centuries past are recreated together with their vines,
olive groves, sheep and oxen, horses, dogs, trees and herbs. Although we now know that
neither Virgil nor any of the courtiers in the emperor’s favour did any planting, ploughing,
shearing or milking themselves, we are charmed by Virgil’s eloquence and his vivid
depictions of rural life into suspending disbelief. We believe we can plant vines just like
he did, his instructions are so persuasive. Like Virgil, or at least the farmer he
impersonates, we want the best food and comfort for sheep and goats—“spread armfuls
of straw and ferns beneath them / so neither chills nor colds afflict your tender care” (3:
297-8, Fallon); we appreciate his concern for the welfare of the flocks and herds. This
makes the ensuing shock of disease, the collapse of prized plough-oxen all the more
distressing.
All the work he did, all he contributed—and to what end?
What came of it,
his turning of the heavy acres? His like was never once in thrall
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to wines
transported from Campania, nor did they ever do
damage to themselves by indulgence, feast after feast. (3: 525-8, Fallon)
While the reader is encouraged to assume that virtuous labour is its own reward in
georgic writing, Virgil is consistent in recognising that hard work is relentless for the
worker, who “cleaves the earth with his crooked plough. Such is the labour / of his life …
/ All go and no let up” (2: 498, 513-16, Fallon).
From the ending of Book 3, with its prescient doom of seas filled with dead fish,
rivers run dry, air polluted and “rank contagion” (3: 566) stalking those left alive, Virgil
moves to the redemption of disorder through a mythic organisation of decay and new life
in the form of bees. The bees have a political symbolism: they are suggestive of an ideal
republic, a communal society, determined that all shall work for the queen (or king as it
was originally thought), in order that all shall benefit. But there is a magic to this
description, living power conjured out of slaughter; farmer Aristaeus finally appeasing the
curse of poet Orpheus through strange alchemical sacrifice. And bees have thereby
“supped a draught divine” (4: 220); the offspring of sacrifice, they cannot die: “to him all
things return in time, dissolved / and reabsorbed; there is no place for death—instead
they soar, / still alive—to take their rightful place among the stars” (4: 225-7, Fallon).
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Their apparent self-sacrifice takes on a religious quality, useful to later versions of English
georgic in which the Christian model is attached to the virtue of labour. “For the Georgics
is situated firmly in the world of work by necessity”, writes Kimberly Johnson, “as a
consequence of the earth’s fall from the idyllic age of the reign of Saturn to the demands
of the reign of Jupiter” (xviii). Hesiod’s Works and Days, one of Virgil’s bases for his own
work, claims the iron age as a punishment for human stupidity and hubris: “I wish / I had
nothing to do with this fifth generation, / Wish I had died before or been born after / …
Not a day goes by / A man doesn’t have some kind of trouble” (lines 201-06). Hesiod’s
persistent grumbling, however, removes his “work” from the virtuous struggle exhorted
by Virgil’s Georgics. Virgil associates the “iron” directly with war and its implements,
before Jupiter took over from his father, Saturn, and removed humankind from its easy
ways, when the land gave up its fruits spontaneously; “the earth herself, /unbidden, was
lavish in all she produced” (1: 127-8, Fallon).
In the days before a Cretan king held sway, times
when sacrilegious races fed on sacrificial oxen,
that was the life enjoyed on earth by splendid Saturn,
when they were yet to hear the flare of battle trumpets
and the battering out of swords upon an anvil. (2: 536-40, Fallon)
Iron has its uses, though, and Virgil has Jupiter making human life one of constant hard
labour in order to test human ingenuity; not as a result of sin, however committed, but “to
sharpen wits of men and so prevent his own domain being buried / in bone idleness” (1:
124-5, Fallon). Virgil uses the connections between swords and ploughshares to
demonstrate his ambivalent and sometimes contradictory assessment of the damage
violence does.
There is a persistent and long-held link between war and agriculture, in the
language, the imagery and in the facts of slash-and-burn tactics by armies over centuries.
And farming itself can be brutal in the exercise of might over natural right. Virgil has no
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qualms in taking over land already cleared of undisturbed woodland, wrecking “the
ancient habitats of birds”; he justifies the destruction by showing how productive the
ground has become for human food: “but those once straggly acres blossom now behind
your team” (2: 209-11, Fallon). Grafting, layering and training wild trees, for vines or for
fruit, requires control, so that they “toe the line” (2: 52, Fallon). Of course, Virgil is not the
man behind the plough or carrying the pruning knife; slaves do the work under the
watchful eyes of stewards; men, women and children who must also toe the line. Even
here, the imagery is military—vines “aligned and at the ready” (2: 281, Fallon)—but he
drifts off into the consequences of battle: “the clash of conflict still not started, / though
the god of war roams edgily, in and out among battalions” (2: 282-3).
His poem is a “work of art” as Johnson points out, a poetic reiteration of many other
literary ventures; its agricultural information is partial at best and fairly unreliable when
compared to some of its prose models such as Varro’s Res Rusticae and Aratus’
Phaenomena. Yet, in fact, it is an intricate web of instruction and lyric, which contains a
supreme art that conceals and reveals the work; one of confusion surrounding human and
nonhuman entanglement, how hard it is to survive, whether a bird, tree or herdsman. “By
bringing together elements that would seem to be in opposition”, explains Johnson, “the
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Georgics emphasizes variegation and experimentation … promoting ambiguity and

uncertainty in place of didactic conviction” (xv). In refusing to come down on one side or
the other, however, Virgil has left an interpretative conundrum for future generations.
However legible the land becomes to its workers, scurrying like ants on its
disinterested surface, the environment will always have a trick up its sleeve. A careless
spark can become a wildfire and destroy everything in its path: “its rowdy roar as it chases
sideways on and up, / lording it over every branch” (2: 306-7, Fallon). For Virgil, the threat
of destruction by the gods was of less concern than actual destruction by troops, looting
and raping as they trampled the farms. It was not a circumstance he could get out of his
head, even if he had been fortunate to avoid the worst, and his knowledge of fortune’s
fickle nature kept him facing both ways. Richard Thomas notes the sense of loss of Virgil’s
own pastoral world of the earlier Eclogues, sharpening the difference between what could
be and what actually is taking place in the stressful environment Virgil finds himself
depicting. In Georgics book 3, line 326 “and dew on tender grass is sweetest for the flock”
is taken from Eclogue 8 (15, Lee), and is inserted into an idyllic section on ensuring the
sheep have fresh forage and cool water from early morning until sunset.
This evocation is to have a far from superficial significance a little later in the book, when
the heat associated with the pastoral existence becomes excessive and turns into the
parched setting of the snake and of plague, as the pastoral world, no longer a functioning
world for Virgil, meets its destruction. (Thomas 234)
Virgil’s interpretation of his sources results in distortions, falsifications and

augmentations that have created the “myth” of georgic farming; this is how you grow
vines, tend sheep and so on. Many of the instructions as written are patently misleading.
Yet, there is another kind of message that we now receive from the Georgics, uncannily
close to the anxiety we feel as “nature” seems to retaliate at humankind’s presumptive
and wanton disregard of environmental reciprocity. If we take some of Virgil’s
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“instructions” for grafting, for example, derived from Varro, the trees Virgil describes are
ridiculous: plane trees producing apples, mountain ash trees pears and elms acorns (2:
70-2, Fallon)—he knew this was not possible; agriculture had a more scientific basis in
Virgil’s Italy than his myths allow for. Virgil’s sources, including Varro, were mostly sound
if prosaic in more ways than one. That is partially the point—this is a work of art—but it
is also a way of drawing attention to what is monstrous in the supposed “natural” world,
a world that can no longer be trusted to produce what labour intends it to do. Moreover,
that labour is itself distorted, as the examples of extreme grafting in the Georgics
demonstrate: humans can do this; they think little of disturbing the natural order. There
had always been a suspicion about grafting, one that Andrew Marvell knew was familiar
to his more Puritan seventeenth-century audience, whatever his own views on the
period’s gardening crazes:
No plant now knew the stock from which it came;
He grafts upon the wild the tame,
That the uncertain and adult’rate fruit
Might put the palate in dispute. (“The Mower against Gardens” 23-6)
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However, there is another side to these anomalous trees, one more closely aligned with
the divine and industrious bees: that of celebration of what human skill can do when
working in cooperation with nonhuman entities. In Virgil’s Rome, there was an aversion
to and a fascination for the monstrous, as there is in any period, yet grafting demonstrated
exactly what Jupiter had commanded, as far as Virgil could tell, for “it was he who first,
through human skill, broke open land, at pains / to sharpen wits of men” (1: 123-4,
Fallon). “Virgil seems to have been the first author to portray grafters exploring the limits
of possibility, rather than applying inherited knowledge in tried and tested ways”, writes
Dunstan Lowe, “to graft is to explore, but it had always been an everyday miracle, like any
other form of planting” (469).
The paradox of violence in these poems of celebration is designed as an
encouragement to appreciation for the farmer’s labour, “all go and no let up” (2: 498, 513-
16, Fallon), and is in contrast with the actual aggression of war, even when martial
imagery is employed. “In the same passages in which we find the language of burdening
and wounding,” notes Lowe, “there are often descriptions of sweetening and mellowing,
as well as non-violent personification imagery such as teaching, adoption, and hospitium”
(473). Kimberly Johnson’s translation emphasises the motherly aspect of Virgil’s
discussion of vines, showing how valuable it is to consider different interpretations of the
original. Thus it is that the young vines “learn to climb, to scoff at winds, / to course to the
elm-tops limb by limb” like so many small children (2: 360-1, Johnson). Present-day
literary criticism has shied away from perceived anthropomorphic and zoomorphic
equivalents that allow the nonhuman to say something to humankind that is only what
humans want to say anyway. Virgil would not have been troubled by these scruples, and
in his context we should recognise the benefits of his extended metaphors that carry
meaning way beyond the thing itself. When we see these vine-youngsters in their field of
reference—of birth, of “their mother-soil … so powerfully runs habit in the tender stems”
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(2: 268-72, Johnson)—then we feel the shock of their curbing more acutely.
Later, when they’ve thrived, circling the elms
with lusty bine, then clip their tresses, then dock their arms
(earlier, and they’ll shrink from the knife), then last install
an iron command and curb the streaming branches. (2: 367-70, Johnson; emphasis in
original)
Georgic is not “anti-pastoral” in its insistence that life is hard and then we die—it is
sympathetic to the humans, animals and plants that endure and enjoy their tough lives.
This is important, as stewardship can be misunderstood as command and control, when
perseverance is the only way through. The Georgics celebrate human skill, not just control,
dominance or oppression, terms that have often been laid at their didactic door. Working
the land requires technique not force, persuasion not coercion. Every turn of Virgil’s
versus, his ploughed line, leads round to this truth. There is much that is violent, brutal
and disruptive in these ancient poems; there is also passion, love, sorrow and a desperate
longing for a harmonious world.
So we return to the main theme of georgic as a mode or genre—hard work: hard
to write, hard to interpret, whose theme is one of miracles of achievement amid constant
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setbacks. In the Anthropocene, the concept of “labour” has become considerably more
freighted with ideology, yet modern farmers in industrial societies still emphasise the
combined benefits of hard work and immersion in the living landscape with all its
nonhuman and human inhabitants. Surely now is the time for assessing how this poetic
triumph supports our current realities, through literature certainly, but also through a
pragmatic yet determined resistance to despair in the face of supreme environmental
challenges.
New Georgic / Anthropocene Georgic
It is a moot point, however, as to whether this pragmatic resistance can still be

articulated through the language of agriculture. The georgic has been reworked over the
centuries in order to speak to the different challenges of each era, and sometimes,
following in Virgil’s footsteps, it has been specifically oriented towards agrarian matters,
as the essays included in this special issue demonstrate. British literature of the early
decades of the 20th century, for example, was full of farms and farmers. Raymond Williams
notes how even as the population became increasingly urbanised, the ideas enshrined in
rural and agriculturally-themed literature concerning how to live well persisted, such that
“there [was] almost an inverse proportion … between the relative importance of the
working rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas” (356). At this time, the
language of farming still possessed its didactic authority as a language for life. However,
the progressive intensification of agriculture post-World War II dented its credentials as
a source of didacticism almost beyond repair.
The onset of the Anthropocene, of course, renews with great urgency the question,
with which we began our Introduction, of how we are supposed to live well in relation to
our environment. In recent decades the world of farming might have seemed the last place
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one would search for an answer. The industrialised agriculture that arose in the second
part of the 20th century and still persists in the mega-farms and factory farms of our age
is for many an image of exactly how not to live well. This perhaps explains why
ecocriticism has been a little slow to take up the challenge laid down by Fairer in 2011 to
investigate the possibility of an “eco-georgic” mode, the whole notion of georgic tainted
by its association with destructive anthropogenic practices including those of
industrialised agriculture. However, there are now signs of a georgic renaissance in the
environmental humanities, heralded by a flurry of recent georgic-related activity.
One element of this renewed interest in the georgic is the growing number of books
emanating from the agricultural world itself, which are suggesting new possibilities for
the georgic mode. As yet, these works have predominantly taken the form of memoirs,
and, in the UK, include the bestsellers Wilding by Isabella Tree and James Rebanks’ English
Pastoral (which, notwithstanding Rebanks’ choice of title, is a profoundly georgic work).
Both books model new approaches to agricultural stewardship (see also Terry Gifford’s
essay in this special issue) that involve a growing orientation towards nature itself,
combining traditional agrarian wisdom with a new awareness of species decline, and
actively adopting practices that encourage renewed biodiversity. Tree’s book recounts
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the decision she and her husband took to retreat from what she calls “in-hand farming”
(40), having realised that their intensive mixed farm was not financially viable. Instead
they focused on rewilding their land through replacing their dairy herd and crops with
(almost) free-roaming ungulates such as pigs, deer, ponies and cattle—animals whose
foraging encourages the growth of habitat-rich thorny scrub—and as a result have seen
an extraordinary resurgence of wildlife. Rebanks’ book details elements of regenerative
farming (though he himself rarely uses that term) such as “re-wiggling” a beck [small
stream] on his land and widening and restoring hedgerows, and he professes his
commitment to becoming “a good steward of this land” (213) in specifically
environmental terms. This recalibrated relationship with the land has been identified as
a “new georgic” in contemporary farm-themed writing, in which “farming can be
understood as involving not only the production of food but the production of nature
itself” (Marland 3). In other words, the kind of georgic “care” discussed earlier in this
Introduction, which relates to efforts to protect the well-being of crops and domestic
animals, is here simultaneously extended to the natural world and its wild creatures.
Tree and Rebanks both self-consciously examine the place of their writing in the
georgic tradition, referencing Virgil and seeing the Georgics as both a work of art and as a
text inextricably connected with the practicalities of agriculture. Rebanks takes as his
epigraph a passage from the Georgics that speaks very eloquently to his own relationship
with the land he farms:
But before our iron carves an unknown plain, let our
study be to learn its winds and fickle sky, the local
tricks, the temper of the land, what each zone yields,
what each refuses. (Johnson’s translation, qtd. in Rebanks 7)
The age in which we now live requires more than ever this need for “study” that involves
interpreting the signs that the land offers rather than simply trying to impose human will
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upon it. Such a framing positions the land itself as having didactic powers, and indeed
much of Rebanks narrative concerns the various forms of learning (about both farming
and life) that he experiences in the context of his farm. He also sees himself and his family
as connected with the world Virgil described: “I read the Roman philosopher poet Virgil
and realised that my people belonged to an ancient farming tradition” (33).
An inevitable part of this reassertion of georgic themes has been an
acknowledgement by the farmer-writers themselves of the environmental damage
farming has wrought since its intensification in Europe post-World War 2 (although as
Adrian Tait points out in his essay in this volume, radical changes in farming methods
were already underway in the Victorian period). There was no chance for the farmers of
the late 20th century to dig up, metaphorically speaking, the spears and helmets of past
wars as Virgil’s farmers did; these weapons had already been repurposed into the arsenal
of farming itself, to appalling effect on the landscape and its biodiversity. As Rebanks
explains: “Over thirty or so years, the poet Virgil’s farming tools for waging ‘war’ evolved
from being the battlefield equivalent of spears and swords to something more comparable
to tanks, jet fighters and chemic and nuclear weapon systems” (158). In Rebanks’ view,
this intensification of agricultural weaponry has the dubious distinction of having sparked
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the environmentalist movement, the use of DDT [Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane]and

its effects in particular giving impetus to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which Rebanks
cites as a major influence on his own thinking (91).
In practical terms farming (and by extension, interactions with the environment in
our new age of iron) is still in some respects a battle. Rebanks writes of the difficulty of
working with nature, remembering fields of newly sprung barley devastated by wild
rabbits. He notes that Virgil’s farming philosophy “was that we had to take things from
nature by using our wisdom and our tools, because the alternative was defeat and
starvation” (33). The martial language remains, but in the context of an understanding of
the implication of intensive farming in massive environmental damage, and it is
counterbalanced by an evident love of the “wild things” (148) that co-inhabit the farm.
This is a feeling that Rebanks shares with his friend and mentor, American farmer-poet
Wendell Berry, whose radically environmental agrarian practices can be seen as
anticipating and inspiring the “new georgic” of the 21st century (see also Andrew
Andermatt’s essay in this volume).
Tree also references Virgil, evoking his famous image of the bees emerging from a
carcass. As she encounters the rapidly expanding biodiversity on her farm in the wake of
rewilding she comments:
To us, unattuned, as yet, to the explosive reactions of nature, it seemed this fluttering,
flopping, hopping, buzzing phenomenon was coming from nowhere – like Virgil’s bees from
the belly of a rotting ox. But the truth was perhaps even more miraculous. Somehow, nature
had found us, homing in on our tiny patch of land from unseen distances, the moment these
few acres had become hospitable again. (44)
Here, as for Virgil, the bees and their unlikely appearance from a dead ox symbolise new
life arising from death. But in Tree’s case, the bees are specifically a metaphor for
ecological renewal in the face of species loss. The episode hints at the way in which
Vol 12, No 2
allusions to Virgil’s Georgics are being subtly woven into the language and symbolism of
contemporary literary works addressing agrarian matters. It also gestures towards the
hopefulness with which these new georgic texts are imbued: the idea that, offered care
and hospitality, nature will find us again.
What emerges from these texts is a self-reflexive georgic that is learning to deal
with the vital production of food for a growing global population while at the same time
farming with, and for, nature to the largest possible degree. The authors recognise their
participation in a tradition that stretches back to classical antiquity, but they also situate
themselves in the midst of a specific crisis to which farming itself has contributed. This
new understanding of georgic is comparable with recent accounts of the flexibility of the
pastoral. For example, Deborah Lilley’s “new pastoral” “provides a framework within
which to explore the themes of economic, environmental, and cultural change, and the
burgeoning awareness of ecological damage” (8). But, of course, the new georgic
additionally involves direct, hands-on involvement in attempts to mitigate environmental
damage. As such, its narratives offer the possibility that the language of farming may yet
be restored to the language of life. In a recent interview, Patrick Laurie, farmer and author
of Native expresses his hope for this kind of restoration when he says:
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The physical act of farming feeds a certain mindset and approach to life which is often
founded on patience, steadiness and a fair measure of grit. […] I’m starting to think about
how it might be possible to express something useful through a distinctively rural blend of
language, tone and character. (n.p.)
For Laurie, then, the very challenges of farming in our time can give rise to qualities that,
articulated in a literary medium, can contribute models of resilience and even wisdom in
the face of the environmental challenges with which we are now faced. His words hint
that the georgic mode expressed through the language of farming might once again
legitimately take up its didactic role, and offer, as Laurie hopes for his own writing, some
assistance when it comes to the broader question of how we are supposed to live well.
Contributing Articles
Nation-building was an underlying theme of Virgil’s Georgics and was more overtly
employed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English versions. Georgic as a mode did
not die out at the end of the eighteenth century, rather it became transformed and
entangled in a much wider range of technical and literary texts and practices, influenced
by Virgil’s original. Even the notional inclusion of nation-building, or at least nation-
commiserating seeped into early twentieth-century texts such as Vita Sackville West’s The
Land, written after WW1, and The Garden in WW2. The problem of feeding a battered
nation, and of giving the hard-pressed and weary British reader something to cheer them
(that might also give them a spur to growing their own plants) was at the heart of much
national newspaper and journal output. Matthew Griffiths, in his contribution to this
collection, considers how successful Sackville-West was in her georgic labours, in
comparison with what might be called the anti-pastoral of T. S. Eliot. Both authors wrote
in the aftermath of destruction, as did Virgil; their reactions might have been in line with
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those of the majority of artists and writers attempting some assessment of their rapidly
overturned, re-built and then newly destroyed towns and landscapes, yet their poetic
response was very different. In The Land, Sackville-West seems to struggle with Virgil’s
discursive form so that her own, supremely English byways only serve to emphasise how
distant she is from land workers and their labours. Yet Griffiths argues that this is more
of a strategy than a mistake: “her work emphasizes a different kind of difficulty” from
Eliot’s modernist compression and fragmentation, “that of the ‘monotony’ (Land 3) of
accompanying her in her account of working the land”. “Whether by design or not,” notes
Griffiths, “she reminds us of the effort involved to sustain agricultural enterprise, and in
turn, sustain human society. If it means that the poetry of the land can be hard work, then
reading it now is suggestive of the effort through which we must put ourselves if we want
to sustain the planet”. Griffiths finds her determination to create a positive aesthetic of
working the land is more successful in The Garden, where her “descriptive line” is used to
uncover the detail of horticultural delight. By contrast, Eliot is parsimonious in
description, yet the intellectual effort required to read his landscape is considerable.
“Both Sackville-West and Eliot are responding, in their different modes, to the way
modernity encroaches on the imaginative spaces of land and garden” writes Griffiths; both
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poets offer debates on the need to negotiate with land and labour in redeeming
anthropogenic environmental damage.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English georgic was much more focused on
the multiple benefits to society brought by methodical and “scientific” agriculture; in the
nineteenth century, the benefits of Victorian “high farming” were equally urgent after a
sustained period of famine and agricultural unrest in the early nineteenth century. Adrian
Tait argues in his essay that the capitalisation of farming during the mid to late Victorian
period might have had its origins in improvement, yet often resulted in extreme
exploitation of land and worker alike in order to make a profit out of poor yields. Thomas
Hardy, conscious of the poverty of Dorset land and labour, is aware of how economic
squeezes impacted women’s lives especially harshly in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Machines
were one answer to human and economic harm, for labourer and farmer alike; the
threshing-machine among them “constituted a decisive moment for Victorian
agriculture”; even while they were “shattering the ecological balance of earlier, self-
contained forms of farming” (Tait). Yet there were other literary models, as Tait discusses,
such as Richard Jefferies’ more elegiac depiction of farming in Amaryllis at the Fair: “Iden
has made his peace with a stubborn natural world … and accustomed himself to the
struggle its cultivation entails” (Tait). He has the magical qualities exhibited by Virgil’s
elderly gardener whose plants seem oblivious of seasons and weathers, flourishing at his
every touch. This idyll does not pay, however, and Jefferies acknowledges the inevitable
demise of smallholdings such as these. Tait considers the possibility that an “eco-georgic
necessarily highlights the difficulties (perhaps even the impossibility) of situating and
sustaining such a way of life in a modern, industrialised world, driven by capitalist
economies”. The other side of small farming is that seen in Hubert Crackanthorpe’s short
story of hill farming, “Anthony Garstin’s courtship”, in which isolation and immobility can
result from a refusal to adapt; to external economic pressures and to the emotional costs
Vol 12, No 2
of perpetual struggle as a result.
At the extreme end of this aspect of small farming is Cynan Jones’s portrayal of
Welsh farming in the twenty-first century: there seems to be little change through the
centuries to this moment, where myths and monsters are as prevalent in Welsh ponds
and woods as they were in Virgil’s Italy. In Angelo Monaco’s essay, he discusses the dark
side of Virgil’s Georgics in Book 3—disease, drought, the loss of prized animals—as well
as the close relationship between not only human and nonhuman, but more-than-human
Others who may or may not be influencing the lives and labours of Jones’s characters.
Monaco also argues that the landscape and its beings are active agents in the agricultural
story; places and animals have personalities unrelated to their supposed purpose as
subordinates in the georgic imperative. They are cared for; they have memories, even
dreams, they are part of the land worker’s emotional as well as practical life, as is the
plough-ox in Book 3, dropping dead in the field. “Jones’ works can be approached from a
georgic perspective that reminds readers of who they are and of their enmeshment with
the world”, writes Monaco, a much bigger field than the little worlds in Mantua, Kent,
Dorset and Wales.
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As we have variously seen, georgic is as much about the harmful effects of crisis
and war as it is about the slow, gradual, often difficult process of rebuilding and reforming
what has been damaged or destroyed. As Jessica Bundschuh argues in her contribution to
this issue, moments of devastation and disruption are therefore not extraneous to the
georgic spirit. Rather, such moments motivate the farmer to engage in the peaceable,
though also frequently combative, work of cultivation in the first place. Working from that
premise, Bundschuh’s article investigates, in a series of close readings, how Irish poets
from Derek Mahon through Paul Muldoon to Padraig Regan use the theme of growing
mushrooms to reflect on the ground and fertility of their poetic labour as well as to engage
with the troubled history of Ireland. Although Virgil does not specifically mention the
cultivation of mushrooms in the Georgics, his text resonates with a concern that, as
Bundschuh shows, can be traced through all the Irish poems that she examines: the
capacity of mushrooms to transform waste into nutritious matter, and to engender
networks of connections out of difference and division.
Like Bundschuh, Andrew Andermatt’s article also engages with the peacemaking
aspect of the georgic, though in an American context. Reading Wendell Berry’s “Mad
Farmer” poems against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Andermatt argues that the
ambiguously ‘mad’ persona through whom Berry, himself a farmer, speaks in those poems
represents a peculiar way of caring for the environment. More specifically, Andermatt
demonstrates that the Mad Farmer poems, read in conjunction with some of Berry’s
expository works, suggest a variety of revolutionary environmentalism that must be
distinguished from other kinds of ecological practice current at the same time. In Berry’s
writing, as in Virgil’s Georgics, the farmer emerges as a figure of peaceful reformation and
restorative change.
Typically, this farmer, in both Berry’s and Virgil’s work, appears as male. Caroline
Dauphin’s article, by contrast, explores how Suzanne Verdier and Anna Letitia Barbauld,
Vol 12, No 2
two Romantic-era poets from Britain and France, respond to the georgic tradition in
specifically female, even feminist ways. Concentrating mainly on the suggestive theme of
sericulture, the breeding of silkworms, Dauphin compares Verdier’s French Géorgiques du
Midi (Georgics of Southern France) with Barbauld’s English language poem “The
Caterpillar”. Both authors, as Dauphin’s historically informed readings show, use the
georgic mode to further, in subtle ways, the cause of female emancipation and
empowerment. Weaving threads of connection between Britain and France, moreover,
the writings of Verdier and Barbauld underscore yet again the close relation between
agriculture, poetry, and the work of making peace.
The special issue draws to a close with two essays that signal the future-facing
dimensions of georgic. Ethan Mannon argues the case for a concept of “georgic marvel”,
while Terry Gifford, in an expansive survey of agrarian literature in Britain and Ireland,
reveals the extent of the contemporary georgic resurgence. Mannon draws on affect
theory and affective ecocriticism to explore human emotional response to places of work
(or indeed, to working in those places). His understanding of “georgic marvel” brings
together ideas of enchantment and wonder that arise in the context of georgic labour,
especially from the experience of “1) uncovering human-made relics, often associated
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with an epic past, and 2) observing biotic events”. The former, Mannon argues, can result
in deeper feelings of emplacement in a landscape, while the latter brings home to us the
everyday miracle of the growth and fruiting of plants in an agrarian setting. Mannon
devolps his discussion through a narrative scholarship approach, recounting his own
experience of both sources of marvel: uncovering a “tooth from a sickle-bar mower” in his
Pennsylvania backyard—a relic of its former role as agricultural land—and experiencing
the challenges and joys of his own attempt to grow sweet potatoes. He concludes that
“working the earth creates encounters, including marvelous ones that help us love the
world”.
Gifford too, advocates for the ability of georgic activity and literature to enchant,
and like Mannon, outlines the potential of the georgic for fostering an enworlded sense of
“a radical mutual agency that has a continuity with past knowledge”. His analysis of a
range of primary texts gives a helpful sense of the kinds of themes with which georgic
writing in the Anthropocene is grappling. Both fictional and non-fictional forms reflect the
hard work, sorrows and rewards of life on the land. Having said this, Gifford also shows
how novels such as Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley (2018) bring to light the
danger of an idealising georgic nostalgia, and its vulnerability to becoming enmeshed with
reactionary politics, as it did in the time Harrison’s story is set. However, in Gifford’s view,
georgic at its best, particularly in creative non-fiction writing, has a self-reflexivity and an
ability to bring out the georgic qualities of attentiveness and sensitivity to the nonhuman.
He particularly highlights the ecological potential of what he calls “future-oriented
georgic”, such as that of the aforementioned Tree and Rebanks.
In this Ecozon@ special issue we have taken up Fairer’s suggestion of an eco-
georgic in order to explore its possibilities—as a mode of careful, sometimes arduous,
writing and reading, and, more broadly, as an attitude informing the effort to live more
sustainably on our beleaguered planet. The essays featured here show georgic being
Vol 12, No 2
deployed and refashioned in a number of valuable ways: it can help us to better
understand our enmeshment with the world; it warns us to anticipate difficulty and
disruption; and it encourages our resolve to work towards different forms of restoration.
These essays and the literary texts they investigate participate in a georgic literary
ecology that runs from classical antiquity to the present, but they also point tentatively
towards a way forward through the social, economic, political and, above all,
environmental challenges of life in the iron times of the Anthropocene.
Submission received 6 October 2021 Revised version accepted 15 October 2021
Works Cited:
Clark, Timothy. “Scale.” Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 1, edited by Tom Cohen,
Open Humanities Press, 2012, pp. 148-166.
Dyer, John. The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books. R. and J. Dodsley, 1757.
Fairer, David. “’Where fuming trees refresh the thirsty air’: The World of Eco-
Georgic”. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 40, 2011, pp. 201-18.
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---. “Georgic”. The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800, edited by Jack Lynch,
Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 457-472.
Fowler, Alastair: “Georgic and Pastoral: Laws of Genre in the Seventeenth Century”.
Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing the Land, edited by Michael
Leslie and Timothy Raylor, Leicester UP, 1992, pp. 81-88.
Hesiod. Works and Days. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Hackett Publishing, 1993.
Johnson, Kimberley. “Introduction”. Virgil, The Georgics: A Poem of the Land. Translated
by Kimberly Johnson, Penguin, 2010.
Kerridge, Richard. “Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth,
Provisionality, Temporality.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg
Garrard. OxfordUP, 2014, pp.1-18.DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199742929.013.020.
Latour, Bruno. “Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and
Politics.” What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment,
edited by Albena Yaneva and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 21-32.
Laurie, Patrick. “Interview with Pippa Marland” available at https://thepenandtheploug.
wordpress.com/2021/04/19/an-interview-with-patrick-laurie/.
Lilley, Deborah. The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing. Routledge,
2019.
Lowe, Dunstan “The Symbolic Value of Grafting in Ancient Rome”. Transactions of the
American Philological Association, vol. 140, no. 2, 2010, pp. 461-488.
Marland, Pippa. “Rewilding, Wilding and the New Georgic in Contemporary Nature
Writing”. Green Letters, vol. 24, no.4, 2020, pp. 421-436.
Marvell, Andrew. “The Mower Against Gardens”. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, edited by
Nigel Smith, Routledge, 2013, pp. 131-134.
Rebanks, James. English Pastoral: An Inheritance. Allen Lane, 2020.
OED Online. “Care, v.”. Oxford University Press, September 2021, www.oed.com/view/
Vol 12, No 2
Entry/27902. Accessed 17 September 2021.
Plessner, Helmuth. Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical
Anthropology. Translated by Millay Hyatt, Fordham UP, 2019.
Sayre, Laura. “‘How/to make fields fertile’: Ecocritical Lessons from the History of Virgil’s
Georgics in Translation”. Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by
Christopher Schliephake, Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 175-195.
Thomas, Richard F. ‘Prose into Poetry: Tradition and Meaning in Virgil’s Georgics’ Harvard
Studies in Classical Philology, 91, 1987, pp. 229-260.
Thomson, James. The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, edited by James Sambrook.
Oxford Clarendon Press, 1972.
Tree, Isabella. Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. Picador, 2018.
Virgil. The Eclogues. Translated by Guy Lee, Penguin, 1984.
---. Georgics. Translated by Peter Fallon, Oxford UP, 2006.
---. The Georgics: A Poem of the Land. Trans. Kimberly Johnson. London: Penguin. 2010.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. 1973. Vintage, 2016.
Wordsworth, William. “Home at Grasmere.” The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill,
Oxford UP, 1984, pp. 174-199.
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---. “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1802). Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1802, edited by Fiona Stafford, Oxford UP, pp. 193-8.
Vol 12, No 2
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Author: Griffiths, Matthew Title: Reclaiming The Land, Restoring The Garden? Georgic in the Modernist
Moment and Beyond
Reclaiming The Land, Restoring The Garden?

Georgic in the Modernist Moment and Beyond1
Matthew Griffiths
[email protected]
Abstract
To scrutinize georgic’s position between progress and tradition, this article will focus on the way
those forces become legible in poems composed between the end of the First and Second World Wars. I will
examine Vita Sackville-West’s long georgics The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) to argue that they
indicate the scope of what is possible in the genre given the challenges of both modernity and modernism.
Her poems demonstrate that, in seeking to navigate the changing material and cultural landscapes, the
labour of maintaining an imaginative tradition can be both productive and problematic. The article will
assess the way Sackville-West positions herself as a writer in relation to the figures of the agricultural
labourer and gardener and to the classical tradition, as well as her claims about the language in which
georgic can and should be written. Each poem will also be compared to the poetry and criticism of her
modernist contemporary T.S. Eliot, with particular reference to The Waste Land, Four Quartets and his essay
“Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Engaged in a struggle on both agricultural and cultural fronts, The
Land and The Garden are prone to inconsistency and, even by their own standards, failure. But in these
failures as well as their successes both poems are committed to finding a way of writing human engagement
with the land and literature. As such, they can be instructively read in the present moment to prompt
questions about the way we engage with land and language in the Anthropocene, negotiating between
competing modes of writing and more broadly between natural and human agency.
Keywords: Sackville-West, tradition, labour, T.S. Eliot, modernism.
Resumen
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Para examinar la posición geórgica entre el progreso y la tradición, este artículo se centrará en
cómo esas fuerzas se hacen legibles en poemas compuestos entre el final de la Primera y la Segunda Guerra
Mundial. Examinaré los largos geórgicos de Vita Sackville-West, The Land (1926) y The Garden (1946) para
argumentar su lugar en el género ante los desafíos, tanto de la modernidad como del modernismo. Sus
poemas demuestran que, al navegar por un paisaje cambiante, tanto material como cultural, la labor de
mantener una tradición imaginativa es a la vez productiva y problemática. El artículo evaluará cómo
Sackville-West se posiciona como escritora en relación con las figuras del trabajador agrícola y el jardinero
y con la tradición clásica, así como sus declaraciones sobre el lenguaje en el que el geórgico puede y debe
escribirse. Cada poema se comparará también con la poesía y la crítica de su contemporáneo modernista
T.S. Eliot, con especial referencia a The Waste Land, Four Quartets y su ensayo “Tradition and the Individual
Talent”. Comprometidos en un doble frente, agrícola y cultural, The Land and The Garden tienden a la
inconsistencia e, incluso para sus propios estándares, al fracaso. Pero tanto en estos fracasos como en sus
éxitos, ambos poemas se comprometen a encontrar una forma de escribir el compromiso humano con la
tierra y la literatura. Como tales, pueden leerse de manera instructiva en el momento presente para plantear
preguntas sobre cómo nos relacionamos con la tierra y el lenguaje en el Antropoceno, negociando entre
modos de escritura que compiten entre sí y, más ampliamente, entre la agencialidad natural y la humana.
Palabras clave: Sackville-West, tradición, trabajo, T.S. Eliot, modernismo.
1I am grateful to the agency Curtis Brown for permission to quote from Vita Sackville-West’s poetry. I am
also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article, who provided invaluable direction and comments.
Thanks, too, to Clara Bleda Megias for her translation of my abstract.
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Moment and Beyond
In advocating that ecocritics reconsider the genre of georgic, David Fairer refutes
the view that “its fascination with mastering nature and exploiting the earth’s resources
for human ends makes it appear at best an innocent trailer for the terrifying global
depredations that concern us today” (203). A contrasting danger, though, is that a genre
concentrating on agriculture is likely to be more backward- than forward-looking; as
Raymond Williams puts it, “English attitudes to the country, and to ideas of rural life,
[have] persisted with extraordinary power, so that even after the society was
predominantly urban[,] its literature was […] still predominantly rural” (2).
Because it attends to the detail of agricultural labour, however, georgic is poised
between these two tendencies. At its best, the genre may even offer instructive, practical
accommodations between human and natural agency, and could today enable us to
imagine “the potential of alternative epistemologies to get out of the predicament of
fatalistic dystopias often revolving around the Anthropocene debate,” which Maria Paula
Diogo et al. find in the notion and practice of the garden (6).
Just as Virgil’s original Georgics were written in response to conflict, Vita Sackville-
West composed her long poem The Land (1926) following the First World War, and The
Garden (1946) during the Second. Her georgics seek a mode of writing that aligns with
agriculture and horticulture, conscious of but often resistant to advances in technology
and society, and to the avant-garde aesthetics of modernism as exemplified by T.S. Eliot.
In this article, I will assess how Sackville-West situates her poems, both in the longer
tradition of georgic and in relation to manual labour, as well as contrasting her mode of
writing with that of Eliot. Insofar as her poems engage with global crisis, in the form of
the World Wars, they can also serve as a test case for what the georgic might now do in
the Anthropocene.
Back to The Land
Vol 12, No 2
The inclusion of labour in the rural imaginary is the characteristic quality of
georgic, and in the opening lines of The Land, Sackville-West aims to establish a
commonality between this labour and literary endeavour, writing of a “Classic monotony,
that modes and wars / Leave undisturbed, unbettered” (3). She uses the artifice of iambic
pentameter, albeit a rough one, to announce the artlessness of the poem, envisaging a
continuous tradition that is to be honoured by dutiful adherence. More specifically, she
aligns the traditions of agriculture and poetry with classical models: “Homer and Hesiod
and Virgil knew / The ploughshare in its reasonable shape [...] never bettered though
man’s cunning grew” (Land 89).
Already, however, this presents a problem: it cannot suggest that the work of these
classical poets was itself monotonous (with due deference to the experience of
generations of schoolchildren), so it perhaps instead suggests that “monotony” is the way
to continue the georgic tradition into the 20th century. In declaring her own work to be a
“mild continuous epic of the soil” (Land 3), Sackville-West collapses distinctions between
her work and nature’s, between her own poem and the classics, and between present and
antiquity, asserting a timeless continuity. But the phrase “epic of the soil” also conflates
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Moment and Beyond
the genres of Homer and Hesiod, of Virgil’s Aeneid with his Georgics. By expanding the
subject of agriculture into the scope of the epic, she tacitly overwrites the latter’s common
preoccupation with conflict.
Sackville-West is working from a tradition of thought that read “Virgil’s path from
pastoral [Eclogues] through didactic [Georgics] to epic [Aeneid]” as Denis Feeney puts it;
in this analysis, the “Georgics become the middle term, bonded with the Eclogues as poetry
of the country, and with the Aeneid as poetry [...] concern[ing] the order that humans
strive to impose on the intransigency of their world”. Sackville-West’s own middle course
in The Land recognizes the effort of rural life without explicitly acknowledging its
historical context. What references there are to war are themselves put to work as
metaphor, such as the “regiments” and “brigade[s]” of “battlemented” flowers (Land 46;
author's italics). The poem is an attempt to plough on through and beyond the war. As
with Virgil, “[w]e may infer [... the] belief that the farmer’s existence is an embodiment of
the idea of ‘swords into ploughshares’: in other words, the moral life is peaceful”,” in
R.O.A.M. Lyne’s words (Georgics xxvi). Like the original Georgics, The Land, “fell upon a
time of war weariness and country-longing, combined with disturbing social changes”
(282), Elizabeth W. Pomeroy points out; furthermore, Ian Blyth asserts that the “lack of
modernity” in The Land “would have been a significant contributing factor to the poem’s
popularity at the time it was published” (19).
However, while Virgil’s career was regarded as “a poetic instantiation of rhetorical
theory’s division of style into the low, middle and high” (Feeney), in her self-declared
“mild epic” Sackville-West is consciously working against this trajectory. She conceives of
her poetry not as an art but a craft, in the line with agricultural trades—the artisan’s “plain
particular poetry” that uses “language, smithied at the common fire” (Land 81). It is as
though she is turning words from ploughshares: rather than elevate agriculture to an epic
tone, she instead seeks an earthly level and a corresponding register.
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In this much, she is working against a particular traditional conception of the genre
expressed in Joseph Addison’s late-17th-century “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” which
maintains that “[t]he precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of
a ploughman, but with the simplicity of a poet” (154); “much less ought the low phrases
and terms of art that are adapted to husbandry, have any place in such a work as the
Georgic, which is not to appear in the natural simplicity and nakedness of its subject, but
in the pleasantest dress that poetry can bestow on it” (158). Instead, Sackville-West
chooses to acknowledge the hardship of rural life, because she regards her own verse
valuable insofar as it resembles that effort.
As if to affirm her acquaintance with the labour of farming, Sackville-West
repeatedly stresses the work-like qualities of her verse: her “pedestrian measure gently
plods,” corresponding with the fieldsman who “Trudges with steady and unchanging gait”
(Land 4); or, because “Nothing but toil shall serve” in the practice of farming, she will “sing
/ Without illusion” (Land 8). Consequently, moments of the poem that might be too poetic
are subverted, as though literary style is itself suspect; for instance, the moment that
“Some snatch of song [is] born” and a youth makes vows to his lover is put literally beyond
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Moment and Beyond
bounds, where “Only the moon shall look behind the hedge [... and] hear the whispered
pledge,” (Land 72, 73).
For all her attention to agricultural labour, Sackville-West did not herself
participate; indeed, “[m]uch of her agricultural information came from an encyclopaedia
of farming given to her by her husband Harold Nicolson (for she possessed little
knowledge of farming),” Pomeroy explains (277). In asserting the value of rural work, she
is also setting herself a goal, to try to honour the rural labourer’s toil through her poetics.
Her concern is with preserving and sustaining an earlier mode of writing to record
conventional agricultural practices: the expression of traditional work in a traditional
work.
The Tradition of Labour and the Labour of Tradition
In a 2011 lecture on The Land, Molly Hite maintains that the book “carries on a
Victorian tradition of competent, readable and vaguely patriotic poems.” So even while
Sackville-West does not seek to poeticize the experience of the rural worker as Addison
prescribes, she still sought continuity with poetry of a previous generation. That
continuity is conscious: Pomeroy observes that The Land “was written partly in reply to
[T.S.] Eliot’s The Waste Land” of 1922 (281), and Sackville-West herself remarks in a 1928
article on “The Formidable Mr. Eliot” that “[w]hen this poem first appeared [...] I admit
that I was completely baffled by it. [...] I said ‘If this is modern poetry, then give me the
old.’” (589).
The contrast between the poets’ respective visions is clear in Sackville-West’s
choice of title, which disposes of “waste” to favour the productive and patriotic
associations of what thereby remains. Further allusions to Eliot’s poem throughout The
Land suggest the relationship she conceives between the two works: when she invokes
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the “Makers of land, one of the nameless line / That fenced, and tilled, and overcame the
waste” (Land 23), she not only refers to the effort that agriculture requires but hints that
the same effort is needed to overcome Eliot’s vision. Even the fritillaries “staining the
waste / With foreign colour” (Land 49) may be a glance at Eliot’s poem and its range of
quotations from outside the Western European canon.
Sackville-West thus works against Eliot’s vision of post-war cultural collapse,
instead seeking to draw strength from a tradition imagined as unbroken and
unfragmented, a “nameless line”. In casting the English farmer as “Rome’s inheritor”
(Land 106), she also seeks continued value in exemplars from antiquity; whereas Eliot’s
classical allusions in The Waste Land to the Sibyl (Poems 53) or the rapist Tereus (63) are
of a grimmer kind. In particular, Sackville-West’s determination to work the land—and
indeed make the land work—after a period of conflict are reminiscent of Fairer’s account
of Virgil: “[a]t the opening of the Georgics the ‘exhausted land’ [...] and ‘consumed earth’
[...] are recovering from years of neglect and the depredations of a bitter Civil War. The
encouragement of new life, however small, is a georgic priority” (211).
Sackville-West’s privileging of effort—“I have refused / The easier uses of made
poetry” (Land 4)—does nevertheless bring her into surprising proximity with Eliot in one
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Moment and Beyond
respect. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot maintains that
tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour”;
neither can it consist “in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a
blind or timid adherence to its successes” (Prose 38). That is, a poet must devote effort to
understanding the tradition, and cannot assume a ready continuity from past into present.
Although The Land does make such an assumption, choosing to instead to match literary
effort with that of the agricultural labourer, Sackville-West is still sympathetic to Eliot’s
understanding of tradition. In her article on him, she writes that:
many people seem to hold a theory that poets today strive to repudiate and destroy what
is called tradition; this is not quite true[. ...] They strive on the contrary to enrich the poetic
tradition, by adding something to it—something which is of today, something which shall
reflect our own very difficult and experimental age. (628)
Her engagement with Eliot acknowledges the rationale for his practice, even though she
does not share his bleak outlook. If, reflexively, these remarks also apply to The Land, then
she has to imagine her poem “strive[s] [...] to enrich the poetic tradition” in a different
way.
The distinction is clear in the two poets’ uses of Virgil, who is central to both of
their literary traditions. Even if Sackville-West “knew no Latin”, she did read the Georgics
“in translation [when] she was halfway through The Land”, her son Nigel Nicolson
explains (Garden n.p.). Meanwhile In “What is a Classic?”, a 1944 address to the Virgil
Society, Eliot insists that the definition of a classic “cannot be one which excludes Virgil,”
and, more significantly, “it needed that particular poet, and a lifetime of labour on the part
of that poet, to make the classic out of his material” (Prose 115–16). Eliot thus implicitly
subscribes to the view that the Georgics are part of Virgil’s labour toward the epic Aeneid;
whereas The Land, as I have noted, hybridizes the genres in “the mild continuous epic of
the soil” (3). For Sackville-West, agricultural and artistic labour are alike ongoing
Vol 12, No 2
processes, rather than culminating in a final achievement, and tradition is not “modified
by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art,” as it is for Eliot (Prose 38). In
her view, progress is only admissible if in the “nameless line” of agricultural practice.
This continuity of tradition into the present necessarily means that it acquires
“something which is of today”. So Sackville-West observes a yeoman farmer “By urgency
and competition driven” to use a tractor where horses “were wont to serve” (Land 24). As
Blyth points out, “some of the changes to the rural world portrayed in The Land were only
just starting to take effect at the time Sackville-West was writing her poem. Tractors, for
instance, were introduced during the First World War, but did not enter into widespread
use until a decade or so later” (27–28). But—perhaps because of the association between
war and technological development— Sackville-West only reluctantly admits the tractor
into the poem, being largely resistant to change on a scale that could disrupt the continuity
of practice she envisages.
The poem similarly repudiates the value of book-learning in favour of practical
understanding:
nature still defeats
The frowsty science of the cloistered men,
Their theory, their conceits;
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Moment and Beyond
The faith within [the farmer] still derides the pen,

Experience his text-book. (24–25)
Given her reliance on an agricultural encyclopaedia in composing the poem, it is perhaps

a little disingenuous of Sackville-West to disavow the “frowsty science of the cloistered
men” and claim “[e]xperience” as a “text-book”. But it also speaks to the ground she wants
to make up between her literary practice and the work of the farmer, finding terms of art
that respect the agricultural tradition rather than seeking to aestheticize it.
Her position seems all the more conservative in the light of another of her articles
from 1928. Introducing her series on “Poetry of Today”, Sackville-West writes:
within the last twenty or thirty years [...] machinery and science, ceasing to be the
preoccupation of a comparatively few specialists, have become an absolutely dominating
and unescapable influence in the lives of all. And it is impossible that poetry, and the
thought of poets, and the general shape of their mind, should have remained unaffected by
so extraordinary a change taking place over nearly the whole face of the globe, and in the
mind of thinking man. (290)
The contrast between the views expressed in this article and those in The Land, which
insists on remaining “unaffected” by these developments, may be due to the two years’
difference between them; or it may be that while Sackville-West could reconcile herself
intellectually to scientific change, she could not accommodate it to her poetics. Likewise,
she understands that “modern poetry is difficult because it is highly experimental”
(“Today” 289), but elected not to undertake such experiment in The Land. Indeed, in
implicitly rejecting Eliot’s modernist aesthetics, her work emphasizes a different kind of
difficulty—that of the “monotony” (Land 3) of accompanying her in her account of
working the land.
In places, it requires sustained effort on the part of the 21st-century reader to
Vol 12, No 2
plough on with what Hite calls a “banal” poem: even allowing for Sackville-West’s own
disclaimers, she is given to archaisms, inversions and digressions, as for example when
she recapitulates a shepherd’s “unpublished vow” about his vocation, including a
parenthesis inside what is already a digression (Land 65). The difficulty lies not so much
with the digression itself—Fairer allows the georgic’s capacity for “attention [being] paid,
sometimes digressively, to what seems trivial or inconsequential” (205)—but in the strain
of trying to identify with the worker, in this case a shepherd, when his thought is
“Unknown to its maker” and “only known / To [...] God” (Land 65). In her attempts to
integrate her omniscient position with that of the shepherd, she is in fact revealing the
distance between them.
Her attempt to make such connections poetically is again usefully contrasted with
her criticism. In her article on Eliot, she writes: “life is becoming more and more
complicated; our knowledge is increasing, and our problems are increasing with our
knowledge; poetry, trying to keep pace, resorts inevitably to methods which many people
consider illegitimate” (628). But she writes that Eliot’s employment of such methods, “is
intentional [. ...] is deliberate”, and “[e]verything became clear” to her when she read one
of the closing lines of The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
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Moment and Beyond
(“Formidable” 589, Poems 71). Because “[e]verything is tottering”, Eliot is making “a

desperate last attempt to shore it up” as “a man loaded with the weight and richness of
culture; loving it, hating it; trying to throw it off, trying to break it down into fresh
patterns; trying to dissolve something in order to re-create” (“Formidable” 589).
Rather than attempt such experimentation to meet the modern world in The Land,
however, Sackville-West relies on the georgic tradition’s “mixed character” (Fairer 205)
to supply the connections between the different elements of her poem, with mixed results.
Whether by design or not, she reminds us of the effort involved to sustain agricultural
enterprise, and in turn, sustain human society. If it means that the poetry of the land can
be hard work, then reading it now is suggestive of the effort through which we must put
ourselves if we want to sustain the planet.
The Avant-Garden?
“[A]cknowledging that human activities have altered the most basic life processes
at a planetary level necessarily entails that conservancy and environmentalism must
radically change their methods and objectives,” write Diogo et al. (4), proposing that the
garden, “as a crossover platform between nature, science and technology” (6), offers a
means of envisaging such radical change. By the same token, Sackville-West’s The Garden
(1946) can offer a corresponding opportunity to imagine what Nicolson calls “the
alternating conflict and collaboration between [hu]man[ity] and nature” (n.p.), even if
that opportunity is one the poet is sometimes reluctant or unable to exploit.
Diogo et al. see “the potential of alternative epistemologies to get out of the
predicament of fatalistic dystopias often revolving around the Anthropocene debate” (6).
The Garden certainly eschews what we might call the “fatalistic dystopia” of The Waste
Land, and like The Land seeks a practical means of engagement with nature and the
Vol 12, No 2
landscape as a way of addressing the complexity of the contemporary. As Diogo et al. put
it, “an environmental ethics that has gardening as its central metaphor and model allows
for an open and frank discussion regarding the aim and methods of environmental
interventions” (3).
The Garden’s interventions are cultural as well as environmental, being concerned
not only with how to garden but how to write the garden, horticulture serving as both the
vehicle and tenor of metaphor. The poem follows The Land in that Sackville-West
concentrates there as much on the practice of georgic as on farming; but whereas that
poem seeks a “pedestrian measure” (4) common to field and page, literature and
horticulture in The Garden correspond insofar as Sackville-West is preoccupied by her
skill in both—or rather, her lack of skill.
In the dedication, she announces that she will “scrawl down / Rubbish of verses fit
for fire, / Gardener, poet, on [a] single pyre” (Garden 9). At such an early stage of the poem
this may only signify the formal deference of a poet to her dedicatee rather than actual
inferiority; yet her two identities are linked recurrently in the poem, as for example when
she declares: “I, poor poet, I / Am likewise a poor practised gardener” (29). The insistence
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on the point is so mannered that it scarcely seems confessional, and given the renown
Sackville-West was acquiring as a gardener would seem to be begging the compliment. 2
However, her increased self-consciousness could be explained by the change of
mode that the transition from land to garden necessitates. The later poem concerns a
much smaller space than the land as a whole, while the labour it involves is more aesthetic
than arable: indeed, she opens the poem proper by describing gardening as “agriculture’s
little brother,” calling for “the pretty treble” rather than “Notes of the bass” (13). This
modal distinction is one Virgil observes when he comments in the Georgics that he
formerly “dallied with pastoral verse” (128, my emphasis) in the Eclogues. In the move
from The Land to The Garden Sackville-West was effectively working in the other
direction, from labour to leisure—that is, reversing the traditionally conceived trajectory
of the poet’s career from low style to high, and this may account for her heightened
concern about the poem’s worth. When it does not share in the productive labour of
farming then the literary may be a compromise in itself, about which Sackville-West
actively expresses suspicion; for instance, she reflects that seed “catalogues misled us, as
a poem / Misleads us” (Garden 33).
When gardening flips from being the subject of the poem to the terms in which its
writing is conceived, Sackville-West effectively offers a modest manifesto for her poetics:
Weave the poor poet all his ablest words
Into a poacher’s snare, a springle set,
Making a mesh of pretty nouns his string
With knots of adjective and epithet[.] (67)
The lines run the risk of being trite—those “pretty nouns” chiming with the “pretty treble”
that is the poem’s clef—and excessive “adjective and epithet” (my emphasis).
As Pomeroy remarks, Sackville-West “does not hesitate to gild a lily” (281),
perhaps in concession to Addison’s pronouncement that georgics represent “the science
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of husbandry put into a pleasing dress, and set off with all the beauties and
embellishments of poetry” (155). However, two lines later the “finch of beauty struggles
through the net” (Land 67). Is this another admission of failure on the poet’s part—or a
suggestion that, for the fleeting duration of that struggle, such beauty is caught? It is also
possible to read the passage as a tacit acknowledgement that the “pretty” nouns,
adjectives and epithets constitute a kind of poetry that will fail to achieve its objectives—
a recognition of the limits of her poetics, compared to the experiments she allowed in her
1928 articles as being necessary to the modern age.
Once the poetic is imagined as the horticultural, though, what had been a tension
between literature and labour—can verse be as productive as farming or gardening?—
becomes entangled with nature in the process of artistic creation, given that the gardener
and environment are together collaborating, and on occasion competing, to bring the plot
to life. The Garden returns to this quandary throughout, assaying the value of poetry
against natural agency. The closing section, “Autumn”, for instance, contains the image of
2The Garden was written at Sackville-West’s estate at Sissinghurst, where, as Rebecca Nagel points out, the
poet “enjoyed sharing her garden with visitors and advertised her pleasure in a note originally written for
the New Statesman and Nation” (22)—among many other horticultural writings.
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spiderwebs as “Somnambulistic poems, fine and light [...] that never might a poet write”
(Garden 129–30). This puts the truly creative, the truly aesthetic, beyond what is possible
for the poet; or perhaps at least the poet Sackville-West thinks herself to be.
The image follows a nocturnal encounter with a frog, who, the narrator reflects,
“had his right to’s life as I to mine; / I had my right to my descriptive line” (129). This
assertion of her vocation is uncharacteristic in The Garden; however, Sackville-West only
stakes a claim for the “descriptive line” of which she makes plentiful use, rather than for
a “fine and light” composition of the kind the spider produces, much as she put the “lyric
liar” of the moon beyond the bounds of The Land (73). Like the earlier poem, The Garden
makes working the soil congruent with poetry, but does not, or cannot always, abide by
the analogy, as though in recognition that the plain, working language at which she
laboured to write of agriculture is not what horticulture demands.
Fairer reflects on the “the compromised, and compromising, georgic, whose
interest in mixture, alteration, contingency, and various kinds of trial-and-error, hinders
it from the big vision, the saving answer” (209), and The Garden is successful on these
terms where it works with rather than against nature and embraces the possibilities of
compromise and improvisation, rather than striving, as she tried in The Land, to make a
poem “uniform and agreeable in all its parts” as Addison requires (157). This is not the
place for “craftsmen [... who] have held / Reality down fluttering to a bench [...] And out of
need made inadvertent art” (Land 81).
For instance, “The gardener half artist must depend / On that slight chance, that
touch beyond control / Which all his paper planning will transcend” (Garden 17)—lines
that both enact and resist the principle they express through a constructive, if likely
unintended, ambiguity over which subject takes the verb “will transcend.” If the “touch
beyond control” transcends “the planning” then the effect is emergent rather than
programmatic, a co-creation of garden and gardener, precisely because the seed catalogue
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can mislead. This reading does depend, however, on the contrived separation of subject
and verb by object to achieve the “~end” rhyme, when the syntax might more prosaically
read “that touch beyond control will transcend all paper planning.”
We could therefore understand that the planning itself “will transcend” what is
otherwise beyond control, a reading that in turn has alternative implications: to give it a
positive inflection, we may read the skill of the artist as incorporating what is emergent
into an overall vision; yet, negatively, it could mean that the “paper planning” puts pay to
any floral spontaneity. As we have seen from The Land, the integration of material into a
comprehensive aesthetic vision is not always possible in georgic, while the imposition of
total order conjures the “fascination with mastering nature” that Fairer says provokes
suspicion of the genre.
The fact that the site of the garden is so fertile with potentially contradictory
readings makes The Garden a productive means of thinking through the mutual
responsiveness of the human and the natural in the 21st century. Serenella Iovino advises
that “thinking the garden and the Anthropocene through one another does not mean
equating them with one another [...] despite all its contradictions, the garden also
discloses unexpected resources” (20; emphasis in original). In fact, it is these
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contradictions that make the garden so valuable. Diogo et al. remark that, in our historic
moment, “the choice is not whether to intervene or not, but to be able to distinguish
different degrees, methods and objectives of intervention, just as gardeners do [... .
G]ardens foster a ‘give-and-take’ and adaptable approach” (3).
The constant labour of managing such give-and-take means that poetry and
gardening for Sackville-West again align in the credo that “difficult art must difficult skill
conceal” (Garden 55). At cursory glance, this recalls the commonplace that skill can make
certain accomplishments, particularly those in the arts, look easier than they actually are;
but what Sackville-West in fact declares is that one kind of difficulty is concealed by
another. In this context, we may think how the deliberate difficulties she faces in writing
traditional georgic conceal but simultaneously express the difficulty of manual labour.
In the preliminary, pre-seasonal section of the poem, this is formally encoded in
the verse. In its five-line stanzas, the ABAAB rhyme scheme reflects a sustained effort of
control:
The Morning Glory climbs towards the sun
As we by nature [are] sadly born to strive
And our unending race of search to run,
Forever started, never to be won,
—And might be disappointed to arrive. (Garden 18)
The double A rhyme before the second B enacts the extra work both poet and reader need
to put in to “resolve[...] The broken pattern of the universe” (Garden 17), while the lines
themselves affirm the notion of continuous rather than culminating labour I have
identified in The Land. But this is also a “difficult art” because it is hard to get right—a
probably unintended meaning that, like the struggle between planning and
transcendence, plays out in Sackville-West’s responsiveness to chance and difficulty.
Her difficulty lies in gauging how much effort is needed. When her “descriptive
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line” seeks to be exhaustive, it closes down opportunities for compromise and
improvisation. For instance, in a Wordsworthian moment Sackville-West bids her
poet/gardener “live, / Instead of speaking; leave his desk,” but fails to heed her own
advice, staying at her desk to enumerate the detail of “books, [...] foolscap, and the blue-
black ink” (67). The effort of communicating these images expresses no actual effort on
the part of the gardener. Crucially, Sackville-West’s tendency for digression is a danger to
which Virgil is alert. At a point where he runs the risk of self-indulgence, he admonishes
himself: “But time is on the move still, time that will not return / While we go cruising
around this subject whose lore delights us” (Georgics 98); indeed, Addison exhorts that
the georgic “avoids all manner of digressions” (158).
Sackville-West’s “swarming detail has a cumulative effect,” Nicolson remarks
(Garden n.p.), and her descriptive line is more effective when used to narrow attention
toward natural detail that may otherwise be lost, “Daring to find a world in a lost world, /
A little world, a little perfect world” that she recounts in “modest lines, almost demure
(Garden 14). This is modesty with purpose rather than an affectation, allowing the
narrator to concentrate, for instance, on a wasp, from whom she “sought / The rosy
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rondure of the moonlit peach” (101)—lines that also observe the georgic’s “commitment
to the minuter readjustments and qualifications that allow life to continue” (Fairer 207).
By directing her focus so precisely, the poet is also, paradoxically, sensitive to the
war taking place around the garden. The ecocritic Timothy Clark writes of “derangement
of scales” prompted by environmental crisis that “collaps[e] the trivial and catastrophic
into each other” (136), in their insistent and counterintuitive connection of the global and
local; in the site of the garden, Sackville-West is attentive to similar disruptions caused by
the Second World War. Searchlights direct attention away from the garden, for example,
and though Sackville-West “Expected sound, to match so grave a scale,” the spectacle is
“mute” (Garden 96). The discrepancy between scales points again to effort out of
proportion to effect. Still more affectingly, the same effect is employed to elegize a bird
destroyed in an air-raid: “It took a ton of iron to kill this lark, / This weightless freeman of
the day” (92, author’s italics). She exercises a tendency Feeney identifies in Virgil, the way
“perspective can shift from one level of scale to another”. Rather than striving to maintain
a common vision as she did in The Land and have it disrupted by the advent of, say, a
tractor, The Garden acknowledges such disruption in identifying the uncanny quality of
military technology. As poem and plot, the garden is what Feeney calls “a variegated
project”, its size and design allowing it to provide the sense of scale and effort against
which the war can be seen.
This is because the work advocated in both The Land and The Garden succeeds or
fails at the scale of the human, struggling with the natural on its own terms, the give-and-
take advocated by Diogo et al. Gardening is conceived of as a means to “keep civility”
(Garden 15),
with the state of war [to]
Aptly contrast, a miniature endeavour
To hold the graces and the courtesies
Against a horrid wilderness. (14)
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Nevertheless the images in which decorum is defended throughout The Garden are
themselves martial—more so than the battlemented flowers of The Land—and Sackville-
West declares that “the gardener in little way / Maintain[s] the bastion of his opposition”
against war (Garden 15). Perhaps this is not as telling as the collision of worlds that we
witness with, say, Septimus Smith’s death in Mrs Dalloway; but Rebecca Nagel observes
that the poem could have been
about a fantasy garden with endless space and time and willing labo[u]r. Instead, she
writes about hard work and cheap dreams in catalogues. The garden is not an escape from
World War II as it first appears, but a translation of the war’s energy into the timeless
setting of every garden: endless effort and failure with the odd unpredictable and
temporary victory. (27)
In drawing on military language, Sackville-West juxtaposes the scales of war and garden,
making the experience of conflict legible in relation to an enclosed space. So long as The
Garden is georgic, it exhibits what Fairer calls the genre’s “fascination with resistant and
indecorous, even obstinately unpoetic, elements” (205). The poem more successfully
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Moment and Beyond
accommodates them than does The Land by not trying to imagine a seamless continuity
between them.
“The land and not the waste land”
In 1926 The Land made some sideswipes at its near namesake The Waste Land, but
by the time she composed The Garden in the 1940s Sackville-West explicitly took up arms
against Eliot’s poem. Clearly remaining troubled by its bleakness, she quotes the first four
lines of “The Burial of the Dead” at the start of “Spring” (Garden 63):
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (Poems 55)
She then mounts a sustained rebuttal to its vision; or at least what she understands that
vision to be. She declares:
Would that my pen like a blue bayonet
Might skewer all such cats’-meat of defeat;
No buttoned foil, but killing blade in hand.
The land and not the waste land celebrate,
The rich and hopeful land, the solvent land,
Not some poor desert strewn with nibbled bones,
A land of death, sterility, and stones. (Garden 63)
Alexandra Harris maintains that Sackville West’s “poetic weaponry looks

vulnerable when compared with Eliot’s” (244); we might for instance contrast his direct,
declarative syntax with Sackville-West’s inversions, restatements and subordinate
clauses. Moreover, in conflating the germinations at the start of The Waste Land with the
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“land of death” at its end, she misses that Eliot’s true object of horror here is the
irrepressible return of life during spring. It is the fact, if not the sentiment, of “The rich
and hopeful land” that gives Eliot’s own verse momentum—his first three lines all end in
enjambing participles that dramatize natural renewal, “breeding,” “mixing,” “stirring”
(Poems 55, Garden 63), driving the reader forward—whereas Sackville-West’s lines circle
around themselves as though trying to arrest this life force. In resisting Eliot’s vision, she
also works against the principle of continuity that informed The Land.
Her poetry becomes stronger when it seeks accommodation with Eliot’s technique,
if not his outlook, as it likewise does when she recognizes the mutual agency of gardener
and garden. It is telling, for instance, that her argument is advanced more clearly by a
loosening of metrics, as though allowing herself the experimentation she affords to the
“Poetry of Today”, as well as by adopting some of Eliot’s themes and cadences. When for
instance she writes “We know that the ultimate vex is the same for all: / The discrepancy
/ Between the vision and the reality” (63), we might as easily append “Falls the Shadow,”
to think of Eliot’s The Hollow Men (Poems 83–84), as recall suspect seed catalogues.
Similarly, the lines “There is nothing to add but the fact we had the vision, / And this was
a grace in itself, the decision / We took between hope and despond” (Garden 63) echo the
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“hundred indecisions, / And [...] a hundred visions and revisions” of “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock” (Poems 6).
Beyond this, the poems share more ground than Sackville-West’s combative tone
would suggest, so her earlier claim that “difficult art must difficult skill conceal” (Garden
55) might also read as an endorsement of the kind of “difficult art” that Eliot’s modernism
presented and with which she engaged in her criticism. The Garden and The Waste Land
both note, for instance, that snow does not so much smother as mother the emergence of
life come spring—Sackville-West’s farmer “knows that underground his plants are safe /
Since snow is warm not cold; and thinks with relish / Of little Alpines in accustomed cot”
(Garden 50), which echoes both the mountainous setting and the “forgetful snow” that
“kept us warm” in The Waste Land (Poems 55).
While Sackville-West was still grappling with The Waste Land in composing The
Garden, Eliot had gone some way since 1922 to accommodate the land and modernity in
the form of his Four Quartets, a sequence which moves into The Land’s rural imaginary
and cultivates a kind of garden there. As Harris puts it, “[m]odernism had declared its
allegiance to the waste land, not to the herbaceous border, and to confirm this Eliot began
The Waste Land with a nightmare inversion of gardening [. ...] By the mid-1930s, however,
[he] himself was returning to more verdant territory” (227). She writes that Eliot “did so
ambivalently at first, tentatively imagining in ‘Burnt Norton’ [...] a version of Eden [. ...] A
great inheritance of garden and nature poetry is gathered and revised in this strange
patch of bare concrete” (227).
If The Land refers tacitly and The Garden explicitly to The Waste Land, Eliot may in
turn be alluding to Sackville-West in parts of the Quartets. Her “fieldsman” who “Trudges
with steady and unchanging gait / Being born to clays” (Land 4) may find an analogue in
the figures of “East Coker” with their “heavy feet in clumsy shoes, / Earth feet, loam feet”
(Poems 186). Eliot’s attention to the seasons also yields such observations as the
Vol 12, No 2
“Midwinter spring” that opens “Little Gidding” (Poems 201), which bears comparison with
Sackville-West’s “spurious spring” (Garden 51) or her description of Viburnum fragrans
“in roseate surprise / That in December hints at apple-blossom” (42).
In his references to “The time of the seasons” and “the time of milking and the time
of harvest” (Poems 186), Eliot also gestures toward the seasonal advice to farmer and
gardener offered by The Land and The Garden; but, as in his critical writings, his true
labour is directed toward the practice and philosophy of writing. The remark in “Burnt
Norton” that “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden” (Poems 183–
84) could easily be applied to Sackville-West’s more effortful passages. Eliot’s is also a
poem that reminds itself “That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: / A
periphrastic study in worn-out poetical fashion” (187), exhibiting a lighter touch with its
self-reflection than the more laboured, artificial poses Sackville-West is apt to strike.
In the Four Quartets, Eliot is conscious, as in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
of what has to change to ensure continuity between past and present. His suggestion in
“Little Gidding” that “history is a pattern / Of timeless moments” (Poems 208) articulates
an understanding of time closer to that implicit to The Land, while in proposing that “last
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Moment and Beyond
year’s words belong to last year’s language” (204), he gainsays Sackville-West’s less
reflective attempts to plough the same furrow as the georgic of the past.
Nonetheless, Sackville-West can in The Garden anticipate “Some poet [...] Breaking
untrammelled, from convention free, / [to] Speak the large language that we still deserve”
(54), echoing her more sympathetic engagement with “The Formidable Mr. Eliot”. Her
poem is indeed more successful when engaging directly with his poetics than when
hothousing The Land’s tendency toward the conservative.
Georgics as Anthropocene Aesthetics
Both Sackville-West and Eliot are responding, in their different modes, to the way
modernity encroaches on the imaginative spaces of land and garden. As georgics, The
Land and especially The Garden exemplify “the mixed character” that Fairer sees in the
genre (205), using the practical language of agriculture and horticulture to engage with
the world rather than in the intellectual endeavour Eliot pursues.
The labour that Sackville-West records, and which she incidentally requires of the
reader, can be redeemed provided we don’t indulge ourselves in a “pleasing moment” that
is “unduly / Prolonged” (Garden 76). We need to meet the forces of nature with a
proportionate, measured response; which will seem effortful, but as Diogo et al. advise,
“[i]f there is no wild nature to which to return, the only option is to move forward and aim
for a ‘Good Anthropocene’,” deploying a “renewed and pragmatic environmentalism” with
a view to making nature into a practical, rather than Edenic, garden (5). The failures that
the poet recognizes and those she doesn’t are alike salutary, because after each she
resumes her labour: “Fail if you must [...] But gloriously fail: the dream, the brag, / No
prudent prose, but lyric rhetoric” (Garden 111) offer a reflection on the poem. They are a
joyous and fearless imperative to work and carry on working through failure—as we now
Vol 12, No 2
find ourselves having to do.
Sackville-West’s acknowledgement in The Garden of the need to do what Clark
advises in response to derangement of scales, to “think on several scales at once” (136),
means that her poem remains open to reading the Anthropocene, its complexities and
contradictions. Like war in The Garden, “the Anthropocene as an ‘aesthetic event’ [...]
sharpens and desensitizes our sensorium all at once. It enables us to see more, feel more,
perceive more, and makes us blind and insensitive at the same time” (Iovino 17). As such,
it is a site in which the tensions between human and natural agency, labour and leisure,
conviction and compromise, failure and success, can be read and re-read—and the more
so when those tensions are expressed rather than suppressed.
Submission received 4 February 2021 Revised version accepted 10 August 2021
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Works Cited
Addison, Joseph. “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics.” The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph
Addison: Volume I, annotated by Richard Hurd. Henry G. Bohn, 1854, pp. 154–61.
Blyth, Ian. “A Sort of English Georgics: Vita Sackville-West’s The Land.” Forum for Modern
Language Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, 2008, pp. 19–31.
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge
University Press, 2011.
Diogo, Maria Paula, Ana Simões, Ana Duarte Rodrigues, and Davide Scarso. “Introduction:
Nature and gardens in the history of science and technology and in garden and
landscape studies.” Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene, edited by Maria
Paula Diogo, Ana Simões, Ana Duarte Rodrigues, and Davide Scarso, Routledge, 2019,
pp. 1–16.
Eliot, T. S. The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems, edited by
Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, Faber, 2015.
---. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited and introduced by Frank Kermode, Faber, 1975.
Fairer, David. “‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-Georgic.”
Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 40, 2011, pp. 201–18.
Feeney, Denis. “Simile World.” Review of Virgil: Georgics, translated by Peter Fallon, and
Virgil: The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles, London Review of Books, vol. 29, no. 1,
4 Jan. 2007. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/denis-feeney/simile-world. Accessed 30
June 2021.
Harris, Alexandra. Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from
Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Thames and Hudson, 2010.
Hite, Molly. “Literature, Life, Gardens: The Influence of Vita Sackville-West.”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKK9CBt0Mko. Accessed 30 June 2021.
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Iovino, Serenella. The Reverse of the Sublime: Dilemmas (and Resources) of the
Anthropocene Garden. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, 2019. RCC
Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 3.
www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives. Accessed 14 Jan. 2021.
Nagel, Rebecca. “Sissinghurst: A Fantasy of Austerity.” The Poetics and Politics of
Gardening in Hard Times, edited by Naomi Milthorpe, Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 19–
31.
Pomeroy, Elizabeth W. “Within Living Memory: Vita Sackville-West’s Poems of Land and
Garden.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 28, no. 3, 1982, pp. 269–89.
Sackville-West, Vita. “The Formidable Mr. Eliot.” Radio Times, vol. 21, no. 270, 30 Nov.
1928, pp. 589, 628. genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/f5fbfa481f084ba89c527885e856f6fa.
Accessed 30 June 2021.
---. The Garden, introduced by Nigel Nicolson. Frances Lincoln, 2004.
---. The Land. Heinemann, 1970.
---. “Poetry of Today.” Radio Times, vol. 21, no. 266, 2 Nov. 1928, pp. 289–90.
genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/6c09977f5166433f9950118c20778777. Accessed 30 June
2021.
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Virgil. The Eclogues. The Georgics, translated by C. Day Lewis, introduced and annotated
by R.O.A.M. Lyne, Oxford University Press, 1983.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, 1975.
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Author: Tait, Adrian Title: “[F]earful Hard Work”: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of a Victorian Eco-Georgic
“[F]earful Hard Work”:

The Possibilities and Pitfalls of a Victorian Eco-Georgic
Adrian Tait
[email protected]
Abstract
As a form of literature that engages with the lived realities of farming life, the Georgic offers an
insight into the close working relationship that is possible between humans and nature, a relationship that
may in turn be described as ecological in its concern with adaptation and sustainability. This essay focuses
on three examples of a Victorian Georgic literature that highlight both the possibilities and pitfalls of making
this association: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), which illustrates life at Talbothays Dairy,
and later, on a marginal sheep/corn farm on the uplands at Flintcomb-Ash; Richard Jefferies’s Amaryllis at
the Fair (1887), which depicts a struggling Wiltshire smallholding; and Hubert Crackanthorpe’s short story,
“Anthony Garstin’s Courtship” (1896), which focuses on Garstin’s life in a hill farming community. All three
narratives were set during a period when innovations in “high farming” effected a shift away from self-
sufficient and potentially sustainable forms of farming to a modern, mechanized, and systematically
exploitative approach to the land; the forms of farming these texts describe are, by contrast, survivals of an
earlier period. As these narratives illustrate, more traditional alternatives to high farming nevertheless
involved back-breaking and often poorly paid work. Moreover, and while these farms were passed over in
the move to high farming, they were still exposed to the vagaries of a now globalised market, and the
periodic depressions that were a result: whatever ecological balance these alternative forms of farming
embodied, it was threatened by these socio-economic pressures. Nevertheless, these narratives offer an
insight into what an eco-Georgic might mean, as a form of writing properly attentive to the challenges of
reconciling human and nonhuman needs, and accommodating both within a global, capitalist framework.
These works are, furthermore, alert to the difficulty of how best to (re)present those challenges; each marks
a shift away from conventional realism and towards new literary modes better able to confront the
idealising, pastoral expectations of an urban readership. As such, these works emerge as prototypical forms
of a modern, self-reflexive form of (eco-)Georgic mindful of the practical difficulties of sustainable living,
and flexible enough to find innovative ways of representing them.
Vol 12, No 2
Keywords: Hardy, Jefferies, Crackanthorpe, high farming, sustainable.
Resumen
Como forma de literatura comprometida con las realidades vividas en la agricultura, el geórgico
ofrece un entendimiento de la cercana relación de trabajo que es posible entre humanos y naturaleza, una
relación que puede describirse posteriormente como ecológica en cuanto a su preocupación por la
adaptación y la sostenibilidad. Este ensayo se centra en tres ejemplos de la literatura geórgica victoriana
que destacan tanto las posibilidades como las dificultades de llevar a cabo dicha asociación: Tess, la de los
d’Uberville (1891) de Thomas Hardy, que ilustra la vida en Talbothays Dairy y, después en una granja
marginal de ovejas y maíz en las tierras altas en Flintcomb-Ash; Amaryllis at the Fair de Richard Jefferies
(1887), que describe una parcela de Wiltshire en apuros; y el relato corto de Hubert Crackanthorpe
“Anthony Garstin’s Courtship” (1896), que habla de la vida de Garstin en una comunidad agricultora en una
colina. Las tres narrativas se desarrollan en un periodo en el que las innovaciones por una agricultura más
eficiente resultaron en pasar de una agricultura autosuficiente y potencialmente sostenible, a un enfoque
hacia la tierra moderno, mecanizado y sistemáticamente explotador. Los métodos de agricultura que
describen estos textos son, en contraste, supervivientes de un periodo anterior. Tal y como ilustran estas
obras, las alternativas más tradicionales en agricultura conllevaban, sin embargo, un trabajo más agotador
y a menudo mal pagado. Además, y mientras que estas granjas adoptaban métodos más modernos, aún
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estaban expuestas a los antojoso de un mercado ya globalizado, y a las depresiones periódicas que de él
resultaban: cualquier equilibrio ecológico que estas formas de agricultura encarnaran se veía amenazado
por estas presiones socioeconómicas. No obstante, estas narraciones ofrecen un conocimiento de lo que
podría significar el eco-geórgico como una forma de escribir adecuadamente atenta a los desafíos de
reconciliar las necesidades humanas y las no humanas, y de acomodar ambas dentro de un marco global
capitalista. Además, estas obras alertan sobre la dificultad de cómo (re)presentar esos desafíos mejor: cada
una marca un cambio al alejarse del realismo convencional hacia nuevos modos literarios mejores a la hora
de afrontar las expectativas pastoriles idealizadas de unos lectores urbanos. Como tales, estos textos surgen
como formas prototípicas de un tipo de (eco-) geórgico moderno y autorreflexivo que es consciente de las
dificultades prácticas de la vida sostenible, y lo suficientemente flexible para encontrar maneras
innovadoras de representarlas.
Palabras clave: Hardy, Jefferies, Crackanthorpe, agricultura eficiente, sostenible.
According to David Fairer, the Georgic embodies a “mutual respect between man
and nature” (202), rooted in the lived reality of farming life, a respect that points to the
possibility of an eco-Georgic. Might the Georgic, a literary genre that focuses on
agricultural life and labour, help us understand how best “to dwell on the earth in a
relation of duty and responsibility” (Garrard 117)? Unlike other literary modes, such as
the “time-suspended pastoral” (205), Fairer argues that “[i]t is Georgic that really
struggles with nature, recognises diversity, tries to understand how an interdependent
system can be sustained and properly exploited (and knows how the two go together)”
(212; emphasis in original). In other words, Georgic literature recognises that human
beings must learn from nature to get the best from nature. Cultivation involves care; it
requires respect (Fairer 202) and it implies responsibility (205); as such, Fairer claims,
the Georgic has “something to contribute” (214) to “any truly committed ecology” (215).
As Fairer also observes, there is a long tradition of Georgic writing, reaching back
to Hesiod and Virgil—and in particular, to Virgil’s Georgics, his “great poem of husbandry
and cultivation” (Fairer 202)—and extending into the eighteenth-century verse whose
ecocritical re-evaluation is Fairer’s focus. In the looser sense of writing about agricultural
life, the Georgic tradition was no less a part of nineteenth-century literature, at a time Vol 12, No 2
when the Victorians had created a system of “high farming” that was (according to James
Winter) both productive and sustainable (16): while industry inflicted “horrific injuries”
on the land, argues Winter (17), high farming developed a “dynamic balance” with it (18).
Indeed, Colin Duncan contends that this form of farming was “perhaps the most
ecologically benign among all the highly productive farming systems the world has seen”
(54). In turn, high farming was celebrated in poems such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
“Northern Farmer, New Style” (1896), and in the novels of R. S. Surtees, such as Hillingdon
Hall (1844) (Perry, “Prospect and Retrospect” 157–158), pointing to the possibility that
their work might form the basis of a Victorian eco-Georgic.
If we look more closely, however, it is clear that high farming was by no means as
sustainable and benign as Winter and Duncan suggest. High farming is usually associated
with a so-called “Golden Age” of British agriculture dating from about 1840 to 1880; it
marked the transition to a highly-capitalized and intensive form of farming that was, as
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Tom Williamson points out, “high-input, high-output” (139). Whereas the “improved”
farming of the previous century was “essentially self-sufficient” (Williamson 139), high
farming required access to distant markets for the materials (such as artificial fertilizers)
on which it depended (Fussell 87). High farming was, like contemporaneous
developments across Europe, “land saving and labour saving” (Van Zanden 230); it used
a range of innovations such as a subsoil ploughing and better drainage (Fussell 83–85) to
reclaim land and improve productivity, and new and improved forms of tools, such as
cultivators, rollers, and harrows (Fussell 91), to reduce its dependency on the rural
workforce. Increasingly, it also resorted to mechanisation.
Consequently, high farming required high levels of investment and borrowing
(Perry, “Prospect and Retrospect” 156, 160). By extension, it also required a “transition
to thoroughgoing capitalism” (157), which “implied a complete reversal of [...] traditional
attitudes towards land” (Moore 550). These improvements notwithstanding, however,
high farming was still relatively labour-intensive (Perry, “Prospect and Retrospect” 160),
and while the situation amongst the labour force was slowly improving, the age of high
farming was also one of “undoubted poverty” among farm-workers (165). Moreover, high
farming did not stand apart from industry. The arrival of the railway underpinned its
success, since it opened up new regional and national markets (Schwartz 231) while
allowing the import of products like the new fertilizers. Those fertilizers were themselves
dependent on industry and industrial innovations such as the steamship: for example,
superphosphate required manufacture, while guano was sourced from South America
(Fussell 87). In addition, while earlier, interlocking and self-supporting forms of mixed
farming constituted “a closed circuit”—and “this was its whole beauty and symmetry”—
high farming marked a shift to an open one, itself akin (argues F. M. L. Thompson) to a
“manufacturing industry” (64).
Finally, high farming was part of a “globalisation of agricultural commodities”
(Schwartz 234) and a much larger change in the “spatial relations of production and
consumption” (236). This would have crucial consequences for British high farmers later
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in the century. Railways made high farming profitable, but it was the railways that, a few
decades later, helped open up the American and Canadian prairies, leading to “dramatic
price declines” (Schwartz 229) and engendering a European wide agricultural depression
(230). In Britain, that depression was further sharpened by the capital-intensive nature
of high farming; as P. J. Perry notes, much of the capital that had been invested in
agriculture was written off “before it had paid for itself” (“Financial Foundations” 365).
As this brief discussion underlines, high farming was analogous to, interlinked
with, and might even be described as an extension of industrial capitalism and a scientific
modernity (Wilkinson 139). While Duncan therefore describes it as “at least one example
of modern agriculture successfully embedded in nature” (Duncan 55), high farming in fact
marked a decisive shift away “from a less profit oriented outlook” to a much more
systematically exploitative and instrumentalized approach to the land (Perry, “Prospect
and Retrospect” 157). There was nothing in and of itself ecologically sensitive or
environmentally mindful about the process. For example, Winter argues that high farming
“tended to preserve many of the hedgerows inherited from the past” (16); in fact, land
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reclamation often involved “grubbing out” hedgerows (Perry “Prospect and Retrospect”
164), substituting plantations for woods (165), and bringing areas of peat bog (untouched
for millennia) under cultivation. “The totality of such activities transformed the landscape
of rural England” (Perry “Prospect and Retrospect” 165), but not necessarily in a way that
signalled an early appreciation of what we now think of as “the environment.”
However, high farming did not entirely supplant earlier forms of farming, as
writers such as Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, and Hubert Crackanthorpe recorded.
The aim of this essay is, therefore, to explore their work and, from it, construct an
alternate Victorian Georgic focusing on the forgotten or orphaned approaches to the land
they described and on their own problematic relationship to the moment of high
farming—and its aftermath. Might their work form the basis of an eco-Georgic? In the first
section of this essay, I examine Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), a novel set in the
midst of an agricultural depression, which highlights the “fearful hard work” (289–90)
that Victorian women experienced labouring in the fields. In the essay’s second section, I
turn to Richard Jefferies’s Amaryllis at the Fair (1887), which is by contrast set during the
mid-Victorian “Golden Age.” Amaryllis focuses on the relatively privileged life of a small
farm-owner: here, in the character of Iden, Jefferies’s expresses his conviction that “the
keystone of English country life [is] a master whose heart is in the land” (Amateur Poacher
141). Iden is deeply familiar with and invested in his farm, and profoundly mindful of the
human and nonhuman life entangled with it, suggesting an environmentally sustainable
way of life at odds with high farming; yet Iden is also in debt, and “wore the raggedest coat
ever seen on a respectable back” (Amaryllis 4). As Jefferies underlines, even the most
attentive relationship to the land is no safeguard against the depredations of a corrosive
capitalism.
I conclude the essay with a reading of “Anthony Garstin’s Courtship” (1896), a
neglected short story by Hubert Crackanthorpe (1870–1896). Here, Crackanthorpe uses
naturalist techniques to achieve a singularly brutal and emphatic reading of the Georgic
in which he probes the psychological impact of the situation sketched in Jefferies’s novel:
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what happens to a hill-farming family when its very existence is and always has been
economically and socially marginal? Even if this form of farming is “sustainable,” what is
the human cost of its maintenance?
As I argue, the work of these three Victorian writers deepens our understanding of
the Georgic—and problematizes its reconstruction as an eco-Georgic—in three main
ways. Firstly, it reminds us of the harsh and complex realities of farming life for those who
were engaged in it. At the same time, and secondly, it casts the contention that any form
of farming is inherently ecological or environmentally-minded into doubt: the very
arduousness of farming life underlines the reasons why the farming community was
already seeking to industrialize its processes, collapsing the arguably illusory “balance”
on which it its sustainability depended. Thirdly, the work of these writers subverts any
reading of the Georgic as itself a simplification or idealisation of farming life. To the
contrary, their work challenged the expectations of a largely urban readership, a
challenge that was embodied in the form that work took; as I argue, it reflects the
recognition that the conventional realist mode was too obviously focused on more
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privileged, middle-class characters and too little interested in the complex, constitutive,
and perhaps even deterministic entanglements of people and place. One response
entailed a shift toward naturalism, a literary mode that deliberately engaged with difficult
and controversial subject-matter, and that approach can be felt in both Hardy’s depiction
of Tess’s fate at the hands of “the President of the Immortals” (Tess 397), and in
Crackanthorpe’s fin-de-siècle short story. Another, quite different response lay in the kind
of literary impressionism on which Jefferies drew, eschewing “the pedestrian progress”
of the conventional plot (Keith 139) for a series of vignettes that give the reader real
insight into the continuities of farming life, and Iden’s predicament.
As I conclude, the willingness of these authors to depict the drawbacks and
difficulties as well as the pleasures and possibilities of a farming life has important
consequences for an understanding of the eco-Georgic and its potential, not as the literary
idealisation of an existence which is self-evidently sustainable and ecologically benign,
but as a literary mode which responds to and wrestles with the problematic process of
remaking the non-human world to serve fundamental human needs. Only with that reality
in mind can an eco-Georgic can make a meaningful contribution to the question of how
best to live upon this earth.
Hardy, Tess, and Hard Labour
The work of Thomas Hardy has always been associated with his depiction of rural
Wessex, loosely centred on Dorset, and of lives lived in close connection to the land. Here,
I focus on Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and on three moments when the novel’s eponymous
central figure is shown in a Georgic context.
The first of these is at “green, sunny, romantic” Talbothays Dairy (Tess 286), where,
Tess forms a contented and integral part of “Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and
men” (128). Small but prosperous and apparently self-contained, Talbothays Dairy has
been overlooked in the move to high farming, which focused on wheat (for bread) and
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livestock (for the new urban markets in meat) (Hoppen 14). Nonetheless, Talbothay’s
prosperity depends in part on the same transport infrastructure that made high farming
possible and (at first) prosperous. As Robert Schwartz shows, Dorset was astonishingly
well served by railways (239–40)—a function of the intense and often inefficient
competition between private companies (236)—and “proximate rail transport favoured
[...] dairy farming” (241). Thus, Crick can take advantage of the expanding urban market
for milk, as Tess sees for herself when she helps Angel deliver milk to a railway station
(186), bewildered by the thought that it will be drunk by Londoners the very next morning
(187; see also Martell 77–78, 85–86). Moreover, and since milk production could not be
supplanted by foreign competition, Crick’s dairy has survived the agricultural depression
of the later Victorian period, when the novel is set. Protected by that prosperity, there is
a sense of “communal ownership” at Talbothays (Ebbatson 135), and while the work is
(as the Georgic insists) often hard, Tess is happy, and happily lost in what she does. As the
narrator carefully explains, most milkers “dug their foreheads into the cows”; “a few—
mainly the younger ones—rested their heads sideways” (150).
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This was Tess Durbeyfield’s habit, her temple pressing the milcher’s flank, her eyes fixed
on the far end of the meadow with the gaze of one lost in meditation [….] Nothing in the
picture moved but Old Pretty’s tail and Tess’s pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a
rhythmic pulsation only, as if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.
(150)
Here at Talbothays, Tess falls in love with Angel Clare. In this novel, however, Hardy
pursues the naturalist impulse he discussed in “Candour in English Fiction” (1890), with
its demand that “the position of man and woman in nature […] be taken up and treated
frankly” (133). Angel and Tess marry, but separate almost immediately, a disaster
precipitated by the revelation of Tess’s earlier, unwanted relationship with Alec (Tess
225). Tess feels she cannot return to Talbothays, where she “had never in her recent life
been so happy” (129), and eventually finds a winter’s work on the exposed chalk uplands
around Flintcomb-Ash (281). It is part of Hardy’s purpose to emphasise that Wessex is
not one, but several “intrinsically different” landforms (102), each of which is worked in
a different way; the “stubborn soil” (282) around Flintcomb-Ash is particularly
demanding, and fit (Marian insists) only for corn and turnip-like swedes, the latter used
as animal fodder. It is, in marked contrast to Talbothays, “a starve-acre place” (284), cut
off from the infrastructure that enables Crick’s diary to thrive and, in the midst of a
depression, survive; for farms such as Flintcomb, the effects of depression were felt much
more severely (Schwartz 242–3).
This drives the farm’s use of cheap labour, often hired on a short-term basis.
“Women’s labour,” Hardy wrote in his article on “The Dorsetshire Labourer” (1883), “fills
the place of a man at half the wages” (186): their cheapness, as the narrator insists in Tess,
makes their labour profitable (284)—no matter how hard the work. Swede-hacking in
“desolate drab” fields (285), Tess and her fellow field-women “slaved in the morning
frosts and afternoon rains” (287). “It was so high a situation,” observes the narrator, “that
the rains had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind,
sticking to them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not known till
now what was really meant by that” (286). As the narrator adds, such work “demands a
distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour” (286). The work is no less arduous when, Vol 12, No 2
later in the season, heavy snow forces the women inside to carry on with reed-drawing,
whereby reeds are prepared for thatching; it is “fearful hard work—worse than swede-
hacking” (289–90).
As it becomes clear, what these tasks have in common is that they are all given to
women. As Hardy also points out in “The Dorsetshire Labourer” (1883), women were
considered better suited to them because tasks such as these required less strength, more
thought, or greater dexterity (186–87). As Tess’s experience underlines, the reality is
somewhat different. When Tess is unable to finish the reed-drawing work allotted to her,
Izz and Marian help out, but first Tess and then Izz break down (Tess 293): “Marian alone,
thanks to her bottle of liquor and her stoutness of build, stood the strain upon the back
and arms without suffering” (293). The work is, in other words, brutally hard, and so hard
that Marian is not alone in her recourse to alcohol as a source of temporary solace.
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Tess’s unrelenting master at the farm, Groby, has his own reasons for being
entirely unsympathetic towards her. The farm’s financial difficulties are, nevertheless,
very real, which drives its unrelenting exploitation of cheap “female field-labour” (Tess
284). Not only were farms like this one passed by in the “Golden Age,” and therefore
unable to secure investment and hence generate improvement, but they were caught up
in the depression that followed, their predicament made still more acute because many of
the farmers were themselves tenants, whose income was in part lost to rent. For Tess, Izz,
and Marian, argues Roger Ebbatson, the effect is that “exchange-value dominates,” and
they are reduced to and regarded as assets, valuable only to the extent that they are
capable of producing so much labour in a day (135). 1
Two points follow. The first relates to Fairer’s contention that the Georgic
embodies a “mutual respect between man and nature” (202), a respect that flows from a
hard-working and intimate relationship with the land, with “its reading of the signs, its
temporal responsibility” (212). In the working world that Hardy describes, however, that
“mutual respect” and sense of “temporal responsibility” has been supplanted by the much
simpler imperative to get by and where possible turn a profit: consequently, the narrator
notes, “the tenant-farmers [are] the natural enemies of tree, bush, and brake
[underbrush]” (Tess 281), all of which interfere with the opening out of the landscape into
larger fields that might maximise yield. Hardy’s description of Flintcomb-Ash as “the
remains of a village” (281) further emphasises what this marginal way of life entails; it is
a village “uncared for either by itself or by its lord” (285). The second, related point is that
a life of hard work struggling with “a recalcitrant, fallen nature” (Fairer 205) sets its own
agenda for a farmer like Groby: how best to minimise the labour it entails, and reduce
costs. Machinery is the obvious answer, and come March, Tess encounters a daunting
manifestation of it in the form of a steam-threshing machine (Tess 324–25).
Once again, argued Hardy in “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” it was women who were
co-opted to work with and feed this kind of machine (187); once again, the reason (notes
the narrator in Tess) is “probably economical” (327); and once again, it is Tess who finds
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herself given this most unpleasant of tasks, driven to keep up with “the red tyrant that the
women had come to serve” (325). “It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her
so severely,” notes the narrator (326); “for Tess there was no respite” (327). As Hardy
observed in “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” “[n]ot a woman in the county but hates the
threshing machine. The dust, the din, the sustained exertion demanded to keep up with
the steam tyrant, are distasteful to all women” (187).
For the farmer, however, the advantages were obvious: a long and protracted
process could be accomplished more cheaply and speedily. Arguably, the appearance of
machinery such as this constituted a decisive moment for Victorian agriculture, when “the
logic of renewal [was] overwritten by an industrial logic of expansion” (Martell 73),
shattering the ecological balance of earlier, self-contained forms of farming; and here, at
least, Flintcomb-Ash has participated in that wider shift towards a more efficient use of
1 In one respect, at least, the farm might have been fortunate; depression was later deepened where high
farming had taken a hold, because high farming meant high rents (Perry, “An Agricultural Journalist” 130).
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the land. But the general point is that the very nature of farming—as a working encounter
with a self-willed, non-human reality—predisposes it to seek labour-saving efficiencies.
As Timothy Morton argues, the intrusion of the steam-threshing machine into Tess’s
world (3–5) does not mark some decisive break between ecologically sound and unsound
forms of farming, threatening, as Ronald D. Morrison contends, “the ongoing imbrication
of humans into their environment” (209); it is simply the continuation of what Morton
describes as a twelve-thousand-year old agro-logistical system of exploitation “that seems
so real we call it Nature” (5).
This also has important implications for our understanding of the Georgic, and the
ecological uses to which it might be put. “[G]eorgic’s concern with harnessing nature to
human use” (Fairer 204) is also, almost by definition, a concern with finding new, more
efficient, and easier ways to exploit the soil. “Georgic’s interest in new industrial processes
and machinery,” Fairer acknowledges, “would seem to render futile any attempt to locate
ecological principles in georgic writing” (203–4). Yet this may, in fact, be the value of the
Georgic: as the Georgic mode emphasises, humans need to eat, and Georgic literature is
important precisely because it does not avoid that reality. Perhaps we should not
therefore regard the Georgic as the literary expression of a mode of being that is
inherently sustainable, but as an expression of an embodied existence, and everything
that it entails, including the inevitable and problematic process of remaking the non-
human world without compromising the needs of future generations. New machinery
might well make it easier to farm; but it need not mark the end of a relationship predicated
on the desire to establish and maintain a dynamic but enduring balance between humans
and nature.
Such a relationship depends, nevertheless, on its maintenance over time: it
requires lived experience as well as (if not more than) technological expertise. As Hardy’s
story underlines, there was another threat to an “intimate and kindly relation with the
land” (“Dorsetshire Labourer” 181), a threat encapsulated in the perambulations of Tess,
Marian, and Izz, all sometime members of Crick’s household: the increasingly “nomadic
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habit of the labourer” (“Dorsetshire Labourer” 181), which was itself a function of
economic uncertainty (174). “[I]t must be remembered [wrote Hardy] that melancholy
among the rural poor arises primarily from a sense of incertitude and precariousness of
their position” (“Dorsetshire Labourer” 174). “In the Wessex of the major novels,”
observes Jeremy Hooker, “long-settled communities are disintegrating and the
protagonists [like Tess and her family] are migrants;” “in Hardy’s Wessex, history drives
out myth” (Hooker 109). This shift towards a more mobile workforce and more
precarious terms of employment eroded the relationship between labourers and the land
they worked, as “the character of natural guardian” was sunk “in that of hireling”
(“Dorsetshire Labourer” 181): “they have lost touch [wrote Hardy] with their
environment” (182).
There were gains, nevertheless, as Hardy was at pains to point out: often, mobility
enabled labourers to earn more, while “widening the range of their ideas” (“Dorsetshire
Labourer” 181). To Hardy, this opening out of horizons itself constituted a form of
progress, an antidote to parochialism and provinciality, and sometimes a “remedy” to “the
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evils of oppression and poverty” (182) that Tess herself experiences so graphically. (It is
her family’s poverty which, at the novel’s outset, drives the young Tess to seek out the
affluent Alec, with fateful, and ultimately fatal consequences for both.)
What Hardy’s bleak and naturalistic Georgic underlines, therefore, are the human
costs of a close relationship to the land, costs that, in a modern and enlightened age
(“Dorsetshire Labourer” 181), problematize the idea of “long local participancy” (182),
and by extension, the adaptive, reflexive, and above all sustainable relationship to the land
that an eco-Georgic implies. But as Hardy’s description of Tess’s experiences also
underlines, the main reason why such a relationship was fragile at best and at worst
increasingly untenable lay in the conditions created by capitalism itself. Money is the root
of the problem, as Richard Jefferies was also, and perhaps particularly aware. While
Jefferies’s final novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, acknowledges the inevitability of capitalism’s
intrusion into a settled relationship with the land, however, it also casts that relationship
in ways that are themselves decidedly more positive. Here, we can see more fully a
working out of the Georgic as a creative engagement with farming life, a working out that
embodies a sense of that life as constructive and productive and not solely as arduous or
oppressive.
Jefferies, Iden, and the Life of the Small Farm
The work of Richard Jefferies overlaps with Hardy’s; the two writers were
contemporaries, met briefly, and were similarly concerned with labouring life (Keith 140–
41). Although scholarly interest in Jefferies has tended to focus on his nature writing,
ecocritical attention is now being paid to other aspects of his journalism, such as his
writings about agricultural labour and rural life. As Morrison reminds us, the word
“ecology” (first coined in 1866) derives its meaning from the Greek terms for the study of
the home or household, and Jefferies’s non-fiction also explores the fate of the farming
homestead (205) against the broader questions of British agriculture’s sustainability
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(217). Yet Jefferies’ novels remain more or less neglected, although they too offer an
important insight into the nature of Victorian farming, the question of its sustainability,
and of (eco-)Georgic’s relationship to it; they too embody a sense of “ecology as the study
of the homestead” (Morrison 205), and in so doing, they anticipate a modern, eco-Georgic
(216). Here, I explore Amaryllis at the Fair, the culmination of Jefferies’s attempts to
reconcile “rural reality and literary art” (Keith 138).
Jefferies’s solution to that representational challenge is suggested by Amaryllis’
own name, which Jefferies took from Virgil’s Eclogues. In the Eclogues, Virgil extends and
deepens the pastoral, bucolic poetry of his Greek predecessor Theocritus by introducing
a new note of transformation, upheaval, and even “catastrophic loss” to the depiction of
rural life (Davis ix). In this way, the Eclogues give witness to both continuity and change,
vividly realised through a series of ten scenes or vignettes. So, in Amaryllis, Jefferies
combines two narrative threads, and sets them against a background of rural and seasonal
continuity. On the one hand, there is the story of Amaryllis herself, Virgil’s shepherdess in
the Eclogues, who is shown growing into womanhood and falling in love. On the other,
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there is the story of Iden, the most recent (and perhaps the last) in a long line of small
farmers at the fictional Coombe Oak, a figure who, beset by debt, cannot (or will not)
accommodate the changes that modern society demands of him. Both stories take their
place within a narrative structure that constantly emphasises the rituals and routines of
farming life, its pleasures, its difficulties, its challenges, captured through scenes and in
conversations that echo Virgil’s ten eclogues.
Amaryllis is set during the time of Jefferies’s own childhood—that “Golden Age” of
relative agricultural prosperity—and closely modelled on his own experience growing up
on a “struggling smallholding” (Williams 193) at Coate Farm in Wiltshire, a dairy farm
where his father owned the freehold (Drew 182). For Jefferies’s family, these were lean
years. Evolving farming practices favoured larger farms, not family owned small ones
(Williamson 17); Coate Farm stretched to “about forty acres, all of it grass, feeding about
eight cows” (Thomas 35), and by the time Jefferies wrote his novel, his father had been
forced to sell up the land his family had worked for generations (Keith 16–17). (Ironically,
and as we have seen in the case of Hardy’s depiction of Talbothays, dairy farmers fared
comparatively well during the later depression; see also Perry “An Agricultural Journalist”
128.) As the novel suggests, small farmers such as Iden were being supplanted by
proprietors without a living interest in the land, figures who were better suited to
business, and better able to make the land pay. Iden, by contrast, is “hopelessly
impractical” (Keith 140) in matters of finance—and “[t]here are no wolves like those debt
sends against a house” (Amaryllis 156).
Work Iden therefore must; but work is in the nature of the Georgic. As Fairer
argues, the Georgic reflects both the dynamism and the “stubborn materiality” (206) of
the “ever-changing” world (209), and the ceaseless labour demanded by “a struggle with
the entropic principle” (204). “Hard labour conquered all,” Virgil insists in the Georgics,
“and poverty’s oppression in harsh times” (Book I, ll. 145–46). “Always at work,” thinks
Amaryllis as she watches Iden, “and he could talk so cleverly, too, and knew everything”
(Amaryllis 10). Like the citizen-farmer in the Georgics, Iden embodies “[i]ngenuity, effort,
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vigilance, experience, respect, and above all care in husbandry (Virgil’s curas)” (Fairer
205). “In truth Iden built for all time, and not for the little circumstance of the hour”
(Amaryllis 257). Thus, when he has new gate made, it is “meant to last for years, rain and
shine, to endure any amount of usage” (257). This “was at once his strength and his folly,”
the narrator declares; “he made too much of little things” (257). Yet this attentiveness is
very much the point. Within the “non-hierarchical, practical, functioning system” that the
Georgic valorises, “attention is paid, sometimes digressively, to what seems trivial or
inconsequential” (Fairer 205). Iden is himself minutely attentive to the life around him.
He is in turn rewarded by the plenitude that (as Virgil put it in the Georgics) the “Earth
unprompted, supreme in justice, pours out” (Book II, l. 459). “Flowers, and trees, and
grass, seemed to spring up wherever Iden set down his foot: fruit and flowers fell from
the air down upon him” (Amaryllis 190). “It was his genius to make things grow—like
sunshine and shower; a sort of Pan, a half-god of leaves and boughs, and reeds and
streams, a sort of Nature in human shape, moving about and sowing Plenty and Beauty”
(190). So “[i]n summer time,” notes the narrator, the farmstead “was a glory to see: a place
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for a poet, a spot for a painter, loved and resorted to by every bird of the air. Of a bare old
farmhouse he had made a beautiful home” (163). It is, as Jefferies elsewhere wrote, the
“epitome of human economy” (“Future of Farming” 687). “And all this,” the narrator later
adds, “had dropped out of the pocket of Iden’s ragged old coat” (Amaryllis 201).
Iden is, observed Edward Thomas, “a part of the creative power of the world, at
one with earth and wind and sea” (277), a figure who embodies the reciprocal respect
which Virgil celebrates in Book II of the Georgics and Fairer identifies as a defining feature
of the form: Iden has made his peace with a stubborn natural world (Fairer 205), and
accustomed himself to the struggle its cultivation entails; he has learnt how best to realise
“a rich livelihood from her soil” (Virgil, Georgics Book II, l. 460); and he does so in a way
that respects and sustains the equally rich diversity of nonhuman life that congregates at
Coombe Oak. But as the frustrated Amaryllis recognises, the very act of cultivating the soil
with such comprehensive care fatally compromises the family’s ability to make the farm
pay. Even as Iden carries on a tradition that extends ten generations back into the past, an
imperious world is demanding that he make modern, commercial sense of it. As Jefferies
wrote in “The Future of Farming,” farms were “no longer entirely self-supporting”; it was
necessary to “make a ‘profit’”; “to keep account books, a thing never done before” (688).
“[T]he farm,” he wrote, “must become a business” (“Future of Farming” 688). For Iden, the
problem is compounded by the small scale of his holding: “only those who have lived in
the country,” notes the narrator, “could fully comprehend the hopelessness of working a
small farm” (Amaryllis 177). Perhaps the future did indeed lie in large estates that were
better able to weather economic variations and more effectively exploit the land, as
Jefferies elsewhere conceded (Keith 27, 137). In this sense, Amaryllis at the Fair is a frank
acknowledgement that a way of life such as Iden’s is doomed.
Here, readers might also have detected a parallel with Virgil’s Georgics, with its
celebration of the smallholder, bulwark of the republic, a figure who was nevertheless
disappearing from the Roman landscape as great estates (frequently worked by slaves)
took over. Yet Jefferies himself is not prepared to allow his own, modern world its triumph
Vol 12, No 2
over Iden. Amaryllis at the Fair concludes with an “Interlude in Heaven” (Amaryllis 260).
Amaryllis is allowed to love (no matter how hopelessly) the infirm Amadis, and Iden is
allowed to hold on to his farm for a little longer, in spite of “the procession of creditors”
(169) gathering at his door. Behind Jefferies’s decision to defer the apparently inevitable
outcomes of his two narrative threads lies a refusal to allow a cash-nexus to be substituted
for the intrinsic value of the relationships (both human and non-human) that criss-cross
the farm.
As Fairer emphasises, “Georgic never underplays” the difficulties of the farming
life, the responsibilities it imposes, or the qualities it demands of those who undertake it
(205). In the same way that the Georgic emphasises the challenges of farming itself, so an
eco-Georgic necessarily highlights the difficulties (perhaps even the impossibility) of
situating and sustaining such a way of life in a modern, industrialised world, driven by
capitalist economies. Thus, and while Jefferies’s depiction of Iden and his working life
corresponds to the kind of Georgic that Fairer describes, it also illustrates the
impossibility of ever separating out that life from the capitalist forces with which it is
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caught up. “Anthony Garstin’s Courtship” takes up these themes, but transposes them
from Jefferies’s Wiltshire to the Cumberland (today Cumbria) of Crackanthorpe’s own
family home, where the difficulties of making a farm pay and the true costs of such an
existence are still more acute.
Crackanthorpe, Garstin, and (Human) Nature
Collected posthumously in Crackanthorpe’s Last Studies (1897), “Anthony

Garstin’s Courtship” shares a focus on the lived realities of farming life with Tess and
Amaryllis; like Tess, it embodies “a realist-naturalist literature of ‘disagreeable details’”
(Greenslade 8); like Amaryllis, it brings to bear a proto-modernist literary impressionism;
more so than either, it offers a singularly acute understanding of (human) nature. These
features of the story come together in a compelling dissection of a hill-farmer’s unlikely
and ultimately self-deceiving pursuit of love. However, the story is equally important for
its insistence on the difficulties of raising sheep in a remote fell, the customs and beliefs
of those who live there, and their own, inextricable entanglement in a wider network of
socio-economic relations: hill-farming may have been passed by in the race to develop
high farming, but it is nevertheless a part of an increasingly networked, globalised system
of agriculture. Moreover, there is nothing necessarily environmentally mindful about this
form of farming, which tends to denude hillsides, and produce a kind of pastoral
monoculture; memorably, one British environmentalist has described the result as
“sheepwrecked” (Monbiot 158).
As Crackenthorpe’s story underlines, hill-farming is physically demanding work,
made still harder by the upland environment, but that work must nevertheless be made
to pay; yet “of late years the price of stock had been steadily falling; and the hay harvests
had drifted from bad to worse” (Crackanthorpe 280–81). The story opens with a
description of Garstin gathering sheep on the fell-top, a prose-poem that captures his
lonely isolation in the midst of a “great, grey, desolate [and] treeless country” (272); the
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only other “sign of life” is a “streak of white smoke from a toiling train [...] creeping silently
across the distance” (272), ominous symbol of a modern world and its own intrusive
demands. Like the land itself, Garstin is “spare and angular” (272), and weathered by long
days and nights on the hilltops (272). His widowed mother, owner of the farm, is no less
“hard and taciturn” (272): “[h]er face was gaunt and sallow; deep wrinkles accentuated
the hardness of her features” (273).
Mother and son are, the narrative explains, the most recent representatives of a
long line of hill-farmers: “generation after generation had tramped the grey stretch of
upland” (279–80), “a race of few words, ‘keeping themselves to themselves,’ as the phrase
goes; beholden to no man, filled with a dogged, churlish pride” (280). Pride is in their
nature: it is that pride which has sustained Garstin through adversity, including the loss
of his own father, who “died one night upon the fell-top, he and his shepherd, engulfed in
the great snowstorm of 1849” (280). It is pride that sustained his mother, who, when her
brother mishandled the farm’s finances, took over its management, and “cleared off every
penny” of debt “within six weeks” (280). It is pride which, in turn, will be the architect of
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their own downfall. Nearing middle-age, Garstin contrives a marriage to the young and
beautiful Rosa Blencarn, who, pregnant out of wedlock by a man she now detests, is forced
to accept Garstin’s proposal. “[G]rimly exultant” at his success in securing Rosa’s hand,
and aglow with “stolid pride” (289), the deluded Garstin pictures a future in which he will
spoil his young wife with luxuries and hill-farming itself will flourish (292). He then
perjures himself before his mother (293–94), who in “a bitterly ironic denouement”
(Ettorre 53), tells him bluntly that, “from this day forward, [...] ye’re na son o’ mine”
(Crackanthorpe 294), and disinherits him.
Garstin’s mother is convinced that God Himself—the same God whose hand
Garstin sees at work in helping him contrive his marriage—will punish him for what he
has done. She assumes, nonetheless, that Rosa will be grateful for the marriage, and
content with it. Like her son, she does not see the more likely outcome: that the marriage
will never be a success. “[T]oughened by long habit of a bleak, unruly climate” (283),
Garstin seems so perfectly suited to the lived realities of hill-farming that it is almost as if
he has evolved with it. But the reality is also that this same solitary and unrelenting way
of life makes him a poor choice for Rosa, just as her own relatively privileged, outgoing,
and sociable upbringing in the city has made her supremely ill-suited to be the wife of a
hill-farmer; “the marriage between Anthony and Rosa is,” Ettorre observes, “simply a
bargain, a convenient choice in the face of the censorious attitudes and narrow horizons
of a rural community” (54).
As Crackanthorpe’s story highlights, a life of lived intimacy with the land can come
at a cost, a cost which is still more apparent if we compare the Garstins to Iden, who
combines more educated and enlightened attitudes with his own intimate understanding
of the land and its workings. That difference is signalled by speech itself: Garstin and his
mother share a dialect form of speech, but seem trapped within it. Iden can and does shift
in and out of dialect (Amaryllis 7)—as does Tess (Tess 21)—signifying that opening out of
horizons to which Hardy referred in “The Dorsetshire Labourer.” The Garstins are, by
contrast, trapped within the horizon imposed on them by their long imbrication in the
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valley, a horizon emphatically embodied in the fell-side that, like “a monstrous,
mysterious curtain” (Crackanthorpe 273), overshadows the farm; in this “stolidly
immobile” community (277), life carries on as it has always done.
Crackanthorpe’s grimly persuasive short story underlines the problem to which
Greg Garrard draws attention in his own discussion of the Georgic: that a stultifying, even
inescapable “social conservatism” (Garrard 122) may be the result of the kind of intimate
involvement between people and place that the Georgic describes. Yet even the remotest
communities cannot abstract themselves from the socio-economic shifts to which Rosa’s
education and the distant glimpse of a steam train both testify. Even as this little
community turns inward, scorning returning natives like Rosa for their “airs an’ graces”
(Crackanthorpe 281), it remains connected to the wider world. Garstin may believe that
“the succession of bad seasons, the slow ruination of the farmers throughout the country,
were but punishment meted out [by God] for the accumulated wickedness of the world”
(285), but the workings of the market are as much a factor here as they are in Amaryllis
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and in Tess. In the worlds of all three stories, “a capitalist rural order” is in place, and good
times and bad are alike “filtered through this dominant system” (Williams 188).
Conclusion: Towards a Victorian Eco-Georgic
Georgic literature is concerned with “adaptation and co-ordination,” Fairer argues

(205); it recognises that “natural needs and human ones are interdependent” (210); and
it insists that “human beings can ‘learn from’ nature in the very act of ‘imposing on’ it”
(208). As such, he maintains, the Georgic encodes an inherently ecological awareness: “the
underlying georgic premise that we are living in nature’s context, not vice versa,”
embodies an “ecological commitment” (Fairer 209), that points to the practical possibility
of creating a sustainable existence.
But as Fairer also acknowledges, the Georgic’s concern with the lived particularity
of daily life complicates any tendency to idealise the life it describes: it makes the Georgic
self-aware and self-critical, minded to find new ways to express itself that better record
or reflect the problematic realities of dwelling. “It is this complexity that georgic
negotiates” (Fairer 209). This is no less true of the instances of Victorian Georgic
discussed in this essay. Each reflects the diversity of the Victorian farming scene, and the
survival of older, alternative forms of farming into the era of high farming (Perry
“Prospect and Retrospect” 159). Yet even these survivals were affected by the
developments that made high farming possible, not least the development of transport
infrastructure that opened up British agriculture more fully to a global market.
Sometimes, those developments were fortuitous; Talbothays Dairy benefits from the
railways; the farm at Flintcomb-Ash can at least call on a steam-threshing machine to
speed up an otherwise protracted process. Often, however, the advent of high farming
created new difficulties, even for those farms which did not participate directly in the
move toward it. In the highly capitalised climate created by high farming, Combe Oak is
too small to survive, even as a dairy, and even in a “Golden Age” of agricultural prosperity;
Vol 12, No 2
farming at Flintcomb-Ash has simply been made more marginal both because it is less
profitable (sheep/corn rather than wheat/ cattle) and geographically distinct from the
infrastructure that might have opened it to new markets and made it attractive to
investors; Garstin’s hill farm is even more isolated and marginal, yet itself exposed to
fluctuations in a market now increasingly driven by foreign competition. For these farms,
survivals of an earlier era, competition becomes the common problem, as British
agriculture came under pressure from “the agricultures of other self-consciously modern
(or modernizing) societies” that were (still) more tractable for capitalism (Duncan 55).
As these narratives also underline, the alternatives to high farming were not
necessarily more ecologically mindful. On the credit side, we might point to the pastoral
plenitude of Talbothays, or Iden’s proto-ecological investment in a deep future that meets
human and nonhuman needs; on the debit side, Flintcomb-Ash is shaped by the need to
secure some kind of profit at any cost to hedgerow or woodland, while Garstin’s sheep
have stripped the valley and ecologically impoverished the uplands. Furthermore, and
whether sustainable or otherwise, each of these forms of farming entails a life of
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dauntingly hard work. “Look at the arm of a woman labouring in the field,” wrote Jefferies
in “One of the New Voters”; “it tells of continual strain” (244). The reality of rural life, he
added, “is labour” (“One of the New Voters” 244), and this too was a reason why an
increasingly mobile labour-force abandoned a rural life entirely, and why, in turn, farmers
everywhere sought out new forms of innovation and mechanisation to save on labour.
As these fictional depictions of farming life underline, Victorian writers were
mindful of the myriad difficulties that beset the farming community of their time, as well
as the more positive possibilities that a farming life might involve. As their work
highlights, farming communities were often exploitative, and themselves exploited by
larger, capitalist forces that prioritized “economic expansion over ecological renewal”
(Martell 87); in their engagement with what Garrard calls “the uneven terrain of real
work” (145), these narratives challenge any idealised notion that a life of (hard) labour in
the fields is necessarily desirable or enlightening, or that contemporary “English
agronomic customs” (Duncan 54) were of themselves “ecological” (in the sense of
sustainable). Furthermore, these narratives constitute a dynamic and evolving literary
response to the representational challenge of their subject matter: all three writers enact
a shift in literary mode away from realism as they seek a more effective means of
capturing the difficult realities of an agricultural existence, in turn challenging and taxing
their readers. But as such, their work also points to the possibility—and the possible
benefits—of an eco-Georgic, as a mode of thinking and writing whose concern with the
specific, actual, and particular operates as a productive, deconstructive challenge to
unhelpful idealisations and abstractions. As Fairer himself contends, the Georgic’s
interest in compromise and contingency “hinders it from the big vision, the saving
answer” (209); with this in mind, it is possible to glimpse more positive possibilities at
work within these texts, texts that with their hard-headed reading of rural life point to a
more effective and responsible realisation of what ecological awareness must mean.
Submission received 13 January 2021 Revised version accepted 17 August 2021
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Vol 12, No 2
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Author: Monaco, Angelo Title: Georgic Echoes in The Long Dry and The Dig by Cynan Jones
Georgic Echoes in The Long Dry and The Dig by Cynan Jones
Angelo Monaco
University of Bari “Aldo Moro”
[email protected]
Abstract
From his debut novel, The Long Dry (2006), to his most recent, Stillicide (2019), the non-human has
played a prominent role in Cynan Jones’ fiction. Of Jones’ texts, The Long Dry and The Dig (2014) specifically
engage with cultivation, farming, and raising livestock in a Welsh rustic setting. Both novels present a rural
world that resists idealised forms of representing nature as some kind of idyll, thus calling into question the
separation between human and non-human. Starting from this premise, my working hypothesis is that the
relationship between human and non-human constitutes a relevant trope in Jones’ fiction since they are
both caught in the very same moment of crisis, change and transformation. To this end, I would like to read
The Long Dry and The Dig through Timothy Morton’s idea of the mesh that connects human to non-human.
Firstly, I will discuss the generic features of the novels, such as shifting focalisation and temporal
disorientation which can be said to favour an encounter between storytelling and material reality. Secondly,
I will address Jones’ interest in the erosion of the border between human and non-human, illustrating the
affective bonds and sensory ties that connect both dimensions. Taken together, Jones’ novels entail a deep
eco-georgic stance in that rural life is recast in terms of a thematic and material space that brings together
human and non-human, conflating change and crisis, failure and success.
Keywords: Cynan Jones, eco-georgic, narrative form, human, non-human.
Resumen
Vol 12, No 2
Desde su primera novela, The Long Dry (2006), hasta su más reciente, Stillicide (2019), lo no
humano ha jugado un papel prominente en la ficción de Cynan Jones. De entre todos los textos de Jones, The
Long Dry y The Dig (2014) versan específicamente sobre el cultivo, la agricultura y la cría de ganado en un
entorno rústico galés. Ambas novelas presentan un mundo rural que se resiste a las formas idealizadas de
representación de la naturaleza como algo idílico, poniendo en tela de juicio la separación entre lo humano
y lo no humano. Partiendo de esta premisa, mi hipótesis de trabajo es que la relación entre lo humano y lo
no humano constituye un tropo relevante en la ficción de Jones, ya que ambos están atrapados en el mismo
momento de crisis, cambio y transformación. Con este propósito, me propongo leer The Long Dry y The Dig
a partir de la idea de Timothy Morton de la malla (“the mesh”) que conecta lo humano con lo no humano.
En primer lugar, analizaré rasgos genéricos de las novelas tales como el cambio de focalización y la
desorientación temporal, que podría decirse que favorecen el encuentro entre ficción narrativa y realidad
material. En segundo lugar, abordaré el interés de Jones por erosionar las fronteras entre lo humano y lo
no-humano, ilustrando los vínculos afectivos y sensoriales que conectan ambas dimensiones. Consideradas
en su conjunto, las novelas de Jones conllevan una profunda postura eco-geórgica en el sentido de que
remodelan la vida rural como un espacio que aúna lo humano y lo no-humano, amalgamando cambio y
crisis, éxito y fracaso.
Palabras clave: Cynan Jones, eco-geórgico, forma narrativa, humano, no-humano.
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In an interview with Wales Art Review (2017), Welsh author Cynan Jones, born and
raised in Aberaeron (Ceredigion, West Wales), describes his body of work as concerned
with the “tangible relationships” (Lavin) between human and non-human:
I’ve been near the sea, this sea, the majority of my life. I wanted to write a story which had
none of the things my other books call heavily on. Certain sense of place; integration into
that place; tangible relationships. To cast a person out onto the water seemed the right way
to tell a story like that. My own experiences over the years informed the physical action of
the novel. The landscape delivered the possibility of the story. (Lavin)
While the above quoted passage specifically refers to Jones’ fourth novel, Cove
(2016), the non-human is of paramount importance in his entire oeuvre. In the very same
interview, Jones says of his writing that he needs “to understand the place, and what is
possible there, in order to draw the story from it” (Lavin). Jones’ attention to the
human/non-human dynamic interaction discloses the inextricable nature of the bond
between material earth and inhabited world. In Jones’ works, readers can find that hope
and failure, hard work and natural hazards coexist, reminding us of the entanglements
with the more-than-human world. Take, for instance, Jones’ latest novel, Stillicide (2019).
With its “dense web of connections between characters and stories” (Allan), Stillicide
engages with the disastrous impact of climate change on water resources in a near future,
as an uncanny feeling of unhomeliness connects human to non-human. While Stillicide
grapples with the sense of precariousness that equally impinges on humans, insects, and
natural resources in a metropolitan area, The Long Dry (2006) and The Dig (2014)
specifically get to grips with cultivation, farming and raising livestock (cows, pigs and
lambs) in a Welsh rustic setting. Both novels present a rural and georgic world where
everything has to be worked for, making readers aware that the countryside, with its
lambs, ewes, cows, calves, pigs, badgers, bogs, flowers and ponds, is as central as humans.
To some extent, Jones can be said to fit within an English rural tradition that reaches back
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to Thomas Hardy, among others; a literary tradition that insists on the “unconventional
use of the pastoral codes” (Head 12). As Dominic Head explains, Hardy’s modernity arises
from his exploration of “the connection between different periods of agricultural decline,
rather than celebrating an earlier rural heyday” (12). Likewise, Jones represents woes and
difficulties of country life, since “human and animal tragedy provides a foundation”
(Bernhard) for his stories. While the reference here is to The Dig and to the fact that “there
is ‘no bucolic pastoral’” (Bernhard), this lack of idealisation is typical of Jones’ works in
which joys and woes are closely intertwined.
In Jones’ novels, the mutual imbrication between human and non-human, care and
decay, technical skills and disruptive forces forms the basis for the argument in my paper.
The Long Dry and The Dig bring to the fore a shared condition of change and
transformation in an echo of Virgil’s Georgics. As William Batstone contends, the debate
on the nature of Virgil’s poem has yielded “a diversity of compelling interpretations”
(Batstone 125). On the one hand, scholars, like L.P. Wilkinson, see the Georgics as a
didactic treatise on agriculture and technical skills, where country life is depicted as “a
way of life” (Wilkinson 12) with its merits and attractions. On the other, critics have called
special attention to the “tragic and pessimistic aspects” (Batstone 143) of the poem.
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Michael Putnam, for instance, understands the Georgics not as essentially didactic but as
a gloomy meditation on self-fulfilment where “nature’s negative indifference to man’s
situation can only be partially altered by man who, with continuous effort and the
constant imposition of order on her chaos, can expand her rhythms to embrace growth as
well as decay” (Putnam 7). For Batstone, however, “the gathering of the discrepancies and
harmonies of our presence in the world into word and thought” (Batstone 128) reflects
the true strength of the Georgics. In this respect, Jones’ narratives express the same
georgic emphasis on skills, care and responsibility. To a certain extent, The Long Dry and
The Dig call up Virgil’s description of physical and intellectual labour in Book I (ll. 145-46)
of the Georgics, “[r]elentless work conquered / all difficulties—work and urgent need
when times were hard” (8). This quote illustrates, as Batstone points out, that labor
(“work”) in Virgil can entail failure or success in that it conveys a divergent and discordant
meaning, “simultaneously victory and defeat, effort and the need for effort, artifice and
the failure of artifice” (Batstone 137). These lines can then be read as an example of the
polyphonic universe of the poem, thereby calling into question the divide between human
and non-human, failure and success. In their ability to intermingle human with non-
human, joys with woes, Jones’ works can be approached from a georgic perspective that
reminds readers of who they are and of their enmeshment with the world around,
pointing to what Timothy Morton calls “the mesh”, a total interconnectedness without
absolute centres, where “everything is interconnected, there is no definite background
and therefore no definite foreground” (The Ecological Thought 28). In “the mesh,” care
and lingering sense of failure, rootedness and alienation coexist.
Similarly, Jones’ novels challenge binary oppositions, reminding us of the ever-
changing modes of the human/non-human interaction. The Long Dry opens with the
description of a farm where a pregnant cow is missing, while secrets and silences impinge
on the lives of the characters, disclosing a feeling of aching melancholy. In Jones’ debut
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novel, Gareth, a farmer who has inherited an almost unproductive farm in the Welsh
countryside, has to cope with a series of financial and personal problems affecting his own
family. With a temporal dislocation, straddling the borders of past, present and future, The
Long Dry portrays the pervading sense of loss that affects human and non-human alike. In
the same lyrical vein, The Dig combines two narrative strands: the grieving lamentation
of a recently-widowed Welsh farmer, Daniel, with the illegal activity of an unnamed
badger-baiter, known as “big man.” In this novel, mournful and elegiac tones are
intertwined with images of brutality, such as in the birth of malformed lambs or in the
scenes where dogs and badgers savagely fight. Moreover, Jones’ novels emphasise that
everything has the potential for growth but is also subject to decay without practical
application and care. The attention to details and the potential exhaustion of natural
resources is possibly indebted to Virgil. As Janet Lembke argues in the “Introduction” to
her translation of the Georgics, Virgil’s poem suggests that despite hard work, “the world
in which we live has never been made perfect” (xiii). This is what makes Virgil’s Georgics,
Lembke explains, a “poem for our time” (xiii) as it strikes to find a balance between the
anxieties that pervade societies and the hope that a new birth might be possible.
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As alluded to before, farming and raising livestock are crucial themes in The Long
Dry and The Dig. Consistent with the spirit of Virgil’s Georgics, Jones’ vivid picture of the
hard conditions of farming life provides a way to examine the relationship between
writing and material reality, human and non-human. The rural world we find in Jones’
works is not an idyll, a naïf product of the Golden Age. It instead evinces what Jakob C.
Heller calls a “proto-ecological perspective” (250) on the imbrication between human and
non-human because of its attention to details that makes the idyll “itself produced” (250).
As David Fairer argues, the georgic mode does not lay emphasis on the healing and
contemplative effects of nature but on “the minuter readjustments and qualifications that
allow life to continue” (207). Unlike the pastoral, a trope which typically entails “the
perspective of the aesthetic tourist” (Garrard 108), a kind of retreat that “obscures the
realities of labour and hardship” (33), the georgic presents a world demanding pressure
and physical toil. Whereas it is true, as Terry Gifford contends, that the pastoral tradition
can be described as “a roller coaster ride” (159) with all its variants, the georgic unveils
the quotidian and ordinary connections between intellectual and physical efforts. The
georgic mode, Laura Sayre claims, combines “emotion and technical detail, hope and
despair, drudgery and delight, feeling and intellect, observation and lore—and that
therein lies its appeal” (194).
Starting from this premise, in this article I want to read The Long Dry and The Dig
through Morton’s idea of the “mesh.” Firstly, I will discuss the generic features of the
novels, such as shifting focalisation and temporal disorientation which can be said to
favour an encounter between storytelling and material reality. Secondly, I will address
Jones’ interest in the erosion of the border between human and non-human, illustrating
the affective bonds and sensory ties that connect both dimensions. Taken together, Jones’
novels entail a deep eco-georgic stance in that rural life is recast in terms of a thematic
and material space that brings together human and non-human, conflating change and
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crisis, failure and success.
Generic Features
In the aforementioned interview with Wales Art Review, Jones points to the
elemental nature of his prose as an indication of how his style is “instinctual, and […]
determined by the narrative, the story. It’s about the surface, the meniscus – that’s the
language” (Lavin). As Jones’ words suggest, his narrative technique is aimed at conveying
the free flow of human thoughts but also the tangible experiences of the physical world as
if “seeing it for real” (Lavin). So, I want to reflect here on the generic features of The Long
Dry and The Dig in which a set of negotiations between human and non-human arise in
terms of care, responsibility and alterity. This enmeshment discloses changes, gaps and
transformations that highlight the sense of “strange strangeness” (The Ecological Thought
15) in the encounter between human and non-human. Morton’s ecological stance admits
the notion of “the mesh” as “a sprawling network of interconnection without center or
edge” (Dark Ecology 81) where human centrality is questioned. Morton imagines that the
interconnectedness between human and non-human is both alien and intimate, a paradox
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that emerges when we realize that we can never be acquainted with another entity
completely. This meets up with the idea of georgic dwelling as a “long-term imbrication
of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work” (Garrard
108). Greg Garrard, referencing Martin Heidegger as one aspect of georgic, sees georgic
dwelling as a set of rural and agricultural practices that result in a figurative “marriage of
man and place, culture and nature” (113). However, in The Ecological Thought, Morton
criticises the Heideggerian idea of dwelling, specifically the German philosopher’s human-
centred understanding of Dasein as “being-in-the world” (Being and Time 32). According
to Morton, the encounter between human and non-human displaces human centrality,
generating a “vast mesh of interconnection” (The Ecological Thought 38). In narrating this
enmeshment, Jones’ novels show how georgic dwelling is not fixed. The Long Dry and The
Dig orient our understanding in the direction of multiplicity. To a certain extent, Jones’
fiction recuperates the “simultaneous sense of continuity, discontinuity and
interdependence” (Batstone 129) that informs the georgic mode in Virgil. Specifically, in
The Long Dry and The Dig varying focalisation and temporal shifts contribute to a generic
form characterised by dialogism and interaction, that metaphorically opens up to others’
life forms. Moreover, the paragraphs of the novels are separated by white spacing that
makes for shifting focalisation and temporal ellipses, while dialogues, as usual in Jones’
fiction, are bereft of speech marks to let thoughts flow freely.
The Long Dry can be read as a polyphonic narrative where human voices, non-
human traces and the memoirs of Gareth’s ancestors are inextricably interconnected.
Winner of the Betty Trask Award, The Long Dry hinges around a farm located somewhere
in Wales, “on a low slope a few miles inland from the sea” (3), where Gareth lives with his
wife Kate, their children, Dylan and Emmy, and their ailing dog Curly. Gareth has inherited
the farm from his father, who left his job as a bank clerk in the aftermath of World War II.
This information is imparted to readers fragmentarily through Gareth’s reading of his
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father’s memories. Gareth turns to his father’s diary to find consolation, reading the
manuscript at night “to help himself sleep. To bring some sound into the stillness” (27).
The metafictional incorporation of the manuscript adds a further narrative layer to the
polyphonic organisation of the novel. The Long Dry comprises ten chapters, with the
omniscient narrative voice darting in and out of the various points of view. Each chapter
is structured in short and fragmented sections and the titles bear the names of characters,
animals, places or objects, such as “the Vegetable Patch” (13-14), “the Ducks” (19-28),
“Emmy” (37), “the Mole” (39-41), or “the Tractor Wheel” (49-52). In readers, this gives
rise to a multifaceted and fractured vision: through impersonalisation and
personification, both human and non-human are hence endowed with a narrative voice.
Similarly, The Dig orchestrates smells and sounds of georgic life and the result is an
intrinsic dialogism reflected, for instance, in the ways the tale is structured. The five
sections of the novel are divided into short chapters where Daniel’s viewpoint is
juxtaposed to the perspective of the “big man.” More importantly, animals, places and
objects, “The Horse” (7-50), “The Dig” (53-76), “The Cloth” (79-100), “The Sea” (103-28)
and “The Shard” (131-54) are employed as tiles of the sections and are thus placed in an
agential position. The narrative, then, stems from these intra-actions that allow human
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and non-human bodies and meanings to converge. This dialogic structure is evocative of
the vibrant agency of material things. It reminds us, as Jane Bennett contends, that “a
source of action […] can be either human or nonhuman” (viii). Matter, Karen Barad argues,
is “a dynamic intra-active becoming that never sits still” (170). This implies that there is
no privileged position from which knowledge is produced and that we can find agency in
different forms, such as in things and animals. From a material ecocritical perspective,
such an object-oriented reformulation of agency produces knowledge in the very terms
of the encounter between human and non-human, thus in their coming together as in the
mesh. New materialism recognises the porosity of things; that objects and sentient beings
have a more intimate entanglement than might be expected. Environmental writing
should be, as Morton argues, “a way of registering the feeling of being surrounded by
others, or more abstractly, by an otherness, something that is not the self” (Dark Ecology
17). Thus, object-oriented ontology entails that meaning and matter are connected and
this finds in Jones’ use of places, animals and objects as titles of the chapters a direct and
linguistic attention to the non-human.
Contrasts emerge in The Long Dry through the juxtaposition of fertility and sterility
at the same time. On the one hand, the calving season is a symbol of birth. And yet, the
landscape around Gareth’s farm discloses areas of symbolic darkness. I am thinking in
particular of the bogs where the intertwining of earth and water work as a vehicle for
strange encounters that destabilise reality. In The Long Dry, the bog is described as an
unsettling place of green weeds and trees whose branches “lifted up like a man standing
on somebody’s shoulders” (68). The personification of the bog promotes the landscape to
the status of an actant. An actant, Bennett writes, “is neither object nor a subject but an
‘intervener’” (9) and, in The Long Dry, the bog becomes increasingly attractive to cows
which usually go there “to think” (68), thereby pointing to the place as one where
consciousness and awareness are raised. Still, many cows have died in the bog as thick
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mud clogs up the soil and readers gradually discover that Gareth’s missing cow has moved
towards the bog. This place, as local people say, is inhabited by a chimeric beast. The beast
is like a kangaroo, with the legs of an elephant and the face of a rabbit and it obviously
feeds on children. This monstrous creature is endowed with human qualities as it shows
a grimace on its face and “its teeth could give away emotion” (86). When the cow reaches
the bog, readers are allowed to enter into the mind of the animal that feels “watched” (73).
The pregnant cow is tormented by heat and by the weight of her calf, its breath rasping
(85), while it thinks of doing “crazy things” (95).
The transspecies dimension of Jones’ georgic world is predicated on a shared
condition of crisis that affects also the objects in the farm. Take, for instance, the old
tractor that has been in the farm since Gareth’s family moved there in the aftermath of
World War II. The presence of rust and corrosion, together with the faded colour,
illustrates the georgic motif of labor. In spite of its corroded surface, the tractor “still had
a personality” (94). While children would use it as a kind of toy, pretending to drive it, the
tractor displays signs of human resilience. Its engine recalls a human heart, in that it
works “like a person who is strong” (94). The parallel between the tractor and a strong
human being lays emphasis on the exhausting nature of georgic labor which symbolically
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makes the borders between human and non-human permeable. The self-reflexive stance
promoted by Jones’ fiction chimes with Morton’s human/non-human concatenation
consisting of “infinite connections and infinitesimal differences” (The Ecological Thought
30).
However, Morton’s ecological perspective does not point to a sense of familiarity.
It conjures up “the uncanny, the strangely familiar or familiarly strange” (50) which can
be argued is not only anti-pastoral but anti-georgic as well. However georgic writing does
exhibit uncanny encounters in which human and non-human converge, as Virgil depicts
them. In this respect, The Dig constructs a cluster of destabilising meaning around the
motif of digging. Daniel, for instance, removes a shard from the earth. Daniel sees the
metal object as a “mark” (The Dig 39; emphasis in the original), a mythological element
belonging to the place. To a certain extent, the shard exemplifies the vitality of the soil and
its removal deprives the landscape of its familiar qualities. With the material traces
inscribed on its surface, the shard embodies a more-than-human history, testifying to the
entanglement of human and non-human. Daniel, at some point, restores the shard in the
open ground, noticing “a strange part-familiar lettering” (141), an “ogam” that should
never be removed. Like an obscure ancient alphabet, which summons up the archaic
inscriptions on wood and stone, the shard with its linguistic power consolidates the
material presence the landscape.
Moreover, the scene of digging contains indirect allusions to the farmer’s digging
up the war remains in the soil in Book 1 (ll. 494-97) of Virgil’s poem: “the farmer working
the soil with his curved plow shall discover javelins corroded and scabrous with rust or
clank on empty helmets with his heavy hoe and wonder at the huge bones found in
uncovered graves” (19). Material remains, related to the civil wars that plagued the
Roman Empire before the rule of Augustus, striate the soil in Virgil’s poem. Just as the
Georgics signals that regeneration is possible through violence, so The Dig underscores
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the signifying potential of the non-human. However, on that very soil, where crops grow
and animals are raised, Daniel’s wife was killed in an accident, her head crushed by a
horse; in a similar violent fashion, badgers and rats are hunted by the “big man”, their
heads smashed by his terriers, their “flurried clatter of killing” (The Dig 34) producing a
solid and terrible noise. Alternating between these multiple instances of gain and loss,
Jones performs a choral narrative where a common sense of struggle looms large. The
novel then continuously interrupts human perspectives: by embedding non-human
imagination, the narrative thematises the deep imbrication between human and non-
human that participate in a broader dialogue. This interaction is also represented by a
fragmented temporality, an estranged sense of passing time where shifting perspectives
converge.
The temporal structure of The Dig refers to a single day, from dawn to sunset,
though flashbacks and recollections, at times represented in italicised paragraphs,
continuously disrupt the chronological linearity of the narrative. Various echoes of the
past are also conveyed by the figure of digging. The action of digging evokes a way to
explore the unconscious mind, thus illustrating the persistence of a past that lies hidden
and is not easily accessible. The trope of digging gives visual, tactile and olfactory
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substance to this kind of temporal rifts. We can almost hear the spades “cutting through
the thread roots” (67), see the ground “sodden with rain and sticky” (67) or feel “the smell
of rotted leaves” (67) on the dug-up soil. Like the various holes that mark the Welsh rural
landscape, so the narrative displays a fragmentary form, ridden with holes where
contradictions, gaps and ambiguities overlap. Through the recollections of people,
animals and objects buried underground, Jones tries to unbury the most visceral feelings
of the georgic world. The polyphony of Jones’ writing is evocative, in my view, of Seamus
Heaney’s famous lines in “Digging” where the Irish poet draws a parallel between the
ways farmers used to dig the soil and how a poet can explore a human mind, which
establishes connections that cross the borders of time and space. The “cold smell of
potatoes” (1 Heaney) that Heaney evokes in the penultimate stanza of his famous poem
testifies to the synesthetic qualities of memory as it straddles the temporal boundaries
“through the living roots” (1), thereby unearthing hidden connections among sounds,
smells and time.
The temporality of The Long Dry is similar to that of The Dig. Here, Jones disrupts
the chronological linearity of Gareth’s narrative strand by interspersing his search for the
cow with flashbacks and flashforwards that bring to the fore the thematic unity of a
looming sense of crisis. Analeptic incursions stretch chronological time to the limit,
instilling the idea of a long-term imbrication between human and non-human. This is
suggested, for instance, by Gareth’s constant recollection of his father’s memoirs that
overlap with the level of the story. The manuscript is written in Welsh, a language that
Gareth sometimes fails to fully understand, forcing him to “make bridges of meaning here
and there” (27). The memoirs reconstruct his father’s life before the purchase of the farm,
while local tales of folklore are mingled with historical facts, like World War II and the
diseases that affected pigs in the 1950s. Gareth is particularly fascinated by the story of a
child who had once seen an angel in the waterfall (28). Years later, the same child, by then
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a young man, sees the angelic figure again while he lies dying in a bomb crater and a man
runs past “with a shard of metal, blast-whitened in his back, ripped and shaped like wings”
(29). In these memoirs, Gareth seeks comfort and inspiration but what he eventually finds
out is a common condition of crisis, discovering that a similar condition of disorientation
affects the present. The embedding of various narrative strands echo the correlation
among the chaos of the civil wars, political instability and contagious diseases in the
Georgics. In a similar vein, Gareth’s quest for the missing cow symbolically alludes to a
much broader quest for meaning. In this respect, the convergence of various plotlines
creates a mosaic-like frame where legends and facts are intertwined. Significantly, this
feeling of change and crisis is not only refracted in the uncertainties of the present; it also
informs the future. In the sixth chapter, readers learn that Gareth’s child, Emma, will die
“nine days from now” (69). Here, Jones shifts to the future tense, immersing readers in a
proleptic scenario: Emma will go into the woods, pick up a mushroom and die of Amanita
virosa, the so-called “Destroying Angel” (71). The poison will percolate through the organs
of the child and cause death. As these quotes illustrate, the non-linear temporality of The
Long Dry suggests that narratives can favour attentiveness to a shared condition of change
and crisis, mixing up facts and fiction.
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In formal terms, then, the combination of scenes of birth and death, savage
brutality and caring tenderness showcases the impossibility of separating these dynamic
tensions in the georgic world where, in Fairer’s words, “stringent and often
uncomfortable” (“Where Fuming Trees Refresh” 212) feelings arise. As Fairer makes
clear, georgic writing exhibits a fascination with “resistant and indecorous, even
obstinately unpoetic, elements” (205) that serve as physical reminders of the frustrations
and negotiations that characterise human and non-human. In Jones’s novels, the ever-
changing natural forces testify to the importance of humble details and common struggles,
invoking, as Fairer argues, “a sense of being tested through time” (“The Pastoral-Georgic
Tradition” 114). Jones’ fiction can be read as a celebration of man’s care for agriculture
and raising livestock which however problematises the trope of agricultural success,
revealing how, as Richard Thomas argues, “resurgent nature destroys man’s efforts to
subjugate nature through cultivation, and the ways in which man’s success in subduing
and transforming nature carries along with it the seeds of a spiritual loss or failure as it
sets him outside of and against the natural world” (121). Jones’ treatment of georgic
dwelling takes the form of a peculiarly charged encounter between human and non-
human. In my view, his novels present a world that retains, in Kevis Goodman’s words, a
“sensory discomfort” (Goodman 3), exhibiting an interplay between emotional responses
and the material world of smells, sounds, space and time. By varying the focal perspective,
Jones brings attention to the relevance of the non-human which asks to be disclosed in its
own language. In depicting a world in a state of flux, the georgic mode in Jones’ fictional
world raises crucial concerns about the way we perceive our relationship to the rural
world, reminding us of the contingency of our existence.
A Symbiotic Relationship: Sensorial Continuity Between Human and Non-Human
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Jones writes about the rural Welsh landscape as a space that is inhabited, sensed,
smelled, imagined and crossed by fears and hard work. To this end, he employs a wide
range of nouns, adjectives, and past and present participles that portray the georgic spirit
of growth, hard labour and decline. A good example of the procreative force of nature can
be found, for instance, in the following quote from The Long Dry where the landscape is
poetically depicted:
The view is stunning, with the land going gently away and the sea before you, silk and blue
above a line of thick gorse, bursting into yellow. In this weather, in this heat, the gorse
sometimes smells of coconut and honey, and you can hear the seed pods exploding in the
sun with sharp snaps. (43)
Here, the extradiegetic narrator describes the view from the farm where The Long Dry is
set, with a focus on the colours and smells that permeate the area, in an echo of pastoral
idyll. With strongly lyrical tones, the place is infused with the varying shades and hues of
the gorge, its perfume reverberating through the landscape. In formal terms, Jones tries
to convey this symphony of smells and colours with the alliteration of the jarring sound
“b” (“before,” “blue,” “above,” “bursting”) and the sibilant “s” (“stunning,” “sea,” “silk,”
“smells,” “seeds,” “sun,” “sharp,” “snaps”). Moreover, the rhyme “blue”/ “you” creates a
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rhythmic pattern that, in a symbolic way, scatters the smell of honey and coconut, while
the image of the pods popping in the sun is made manifest with the alliteration of the
implosive sound “p,” thereby achieving a great acoustic effect. Before his father’s
purchase, the farm had belonged to an eccentric widow who had lost her husband and
sons during the war and had eventually gone insane. The earth was once covered with
bracken and bramble that, when cleared, became “full and hungry” (13). Gareth then
planted potatoes, cabbages, onions, beetroots, carrots and parsnips, while gorse flowers,
celandines, daffodils, dandelions, primroses, dog violets and bluebells fill in the hedges
with their scent. Albeit this vivid emphasis on the reproductive power of nature, The Long
Dry is also a dramatic representation of the destructive force of nature. Early in the
morning, Gareth goes into the barn and finds one of his cows “kneeling beside […] lowing
sadly and gently” (2) its stillborn calf. Then, Gareth discovers that one of his calving cows
is missing. The search for the pregnant cow covers the entire novel, a quest that reflects
the characters’ fears and anxieties for the future. The Long Dry is filled with apprehensions
in a way that calls to mind “a certain anxiety” (Head 201) that things may succumb to
death and disease as in the Georgics.
The narrative is set during the calving season, in a moment of the year marked by
unusual heat, a harsh climatic condition that intensifies the hardship of georgic labour.
This allusion to heat brings to my mind the “full heat of autumn” in Book 3 (ll. 479-80) of
the Georgics which “brought death to all domestic animals, all wild beasts” (56). Moreover,
the very same ominous impression conveyed by the dead calf in the opening scene can be
found after a few pages when Gareth discovers that another cow has given birth to twin
calves, one of which is born dead. The cows, mostly Friesians, a cattle bred originating
from the northern Dutch provinces, are one of Gareth’s primary occupations requiring
intense labour. Besides, financial troubles and family tensions are as burdensome
responsibilities as his farming work. As the title itself suggests, the unusual searing heat
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of the summer pushes the landscape to the verge of dryness, thereby entailing a
metaphoric erosion of the natural capacity to procreate. In spite of Gareth’s labor, the
“dried land” (The Long Dry 1) of his farm is a foreboding presence that evokes Virgil’s
depiction of the scorching heat in Book 1 (ll. 107-08) “when the soil dries up, its sprouted
grain burnt, in summer’s heat” (6).
Like the cows, also the pigs suffer from natural afflictions and economic
necessities. From Gareth’s father’s diary, we learn that, in the late 1950s, the traditional
Welsh pig, a “strong, long pig with long wide ears and a long jowl” (31), came gradually to
be replaced by the Landrace pig, a bred imported from Denmark and potentially more
economic to raise and, especially, to breed from. In Gareth’s farm, these pigs later
“developed raised lesions, had broken hooves, died easily of pneumonia” (32) and were
eventually diagnosed with Dermatosis vegetans, a hereditary disease that caused
lameness and heart attacks. Gareth’s pigs become “recognisably ‘depressed’” (33) and, on
a symbolic level, the animals are presented as vulnerable and subject to diseases, a
condition that blurs the boundary between human and animal. This depiction of pain and
suffering, shared both by humans and beasts, resembles that of Virgil when, for instance,
the Roman poet describes the death of an ox in Book 3 (l. 518): “[t]he sorrowing plowman
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goes, unyoking the ox that mourns its brother’s death” (58). In general terms, Jones’
account of the diseases that affected the pigs parallels Virgil’s depiction of the Noric
plague at the end of Book 3 (ll. 556-57) that “wreaks carnage and piles up rotted bodies,
foul and stinking, in the barns themselves” (59). Here, as in Jones’ novel, Virgil explores
the suffering of animals as analogous as the condition of humans. The close bond between
humans and animals is highlighted by the common subjection to age and disease and by
an anthropomorphic language that elicits the reader’s empathy. As Virgil warns us in Book
3 (ll. 67-68), “sickness comes in stealth, with graceless old age and suffering, and death’s
relentless rigor seizes us” (42).
In The Long Dry, the threat of complete dissolution is not only suggested by the
heat that torments the countryside, by the stillbirth of calves or by the disease that affects
the pigs. This condition of crisis also extends to human beings, having some hold over the
characters’ lives. As the narrative progresses, we learn that Gareth’s wife, Kate, has had a
series of miscarriages between her adult son Dylan and her much younger daughter
Emmy. These tragic events intensify the collisions between Gareth and Kate, leading them
to emotional distance, silence and evasive behaviour. Kate experiences a severe sense of
loss and frustration because her body is getting old and plump. As the narrator observes,
she was “damp like autumn, not wet in the way young women are, like spring” (The Long
Dry 36). Here, a parallel is drawn between Kate’s body and a humid fruitless season. This
reading is further complicated by the fact that Kate’s dysfunction arises from her
husband’s work in the farm. Gareth has contracted chlamydia, “transferred in fluid from
handling the sheep” (49) and has infected his wife. Kate, who was not born in the
countryside, symbolically represents a foreign body that comes to be contaminated by the
fluids of georgic labour. In other words, Jones depicts Kate’s disease as a further
connotation of decay, albeit in an unconsciously misogynistic way. Jones’ novel can be said
to bring to light Virgil’s connection among labor, amor and disease. While labor is
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important to control the forces that might imperil the animals, amor is fundamental to
farming but it can also become destructive. Both in Virgil and Jones, amor and disease can
be seen as afflictions causing victims. As in the Georgics, here readers can find a
continuous movement of hard work, hope, failure and guilt. Emotional scars are
inseparable from physical changes and they find in the georgic mode a way to refract
economic pressures, labour and the search for material and affective care, recalling the
intricate web in which human and non-human are interwoven. By the end of the novel,
the cow is returned to Gareth by Bill, a neighbour and the drought that plagues rural Wales
gives space to pouring rain, producing “a slightest change in the air” (105) that
symbolically compensates for the sense of loss and pain. The rain, a symbol for rebirth,
embodies the cyclical process of growth and decay in line with the tenets of the georgic
mode.
In The Dig, a certain georgic orientation is similarly at the heart of the narrative,
though the interface of human and non-human is depicted with bleaker tones. Jones’
fourth novel is a stark account of two lonely men, Daniel and the “big man.” As in The Long
Dry, so in The Dig the story is set during a moment of rebirth, “lambing time” (The Dig 1),
while everywhere in the valley “farms were involved in their own private processes” (1).
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In a georgic fashion, The Dig pays homage to the typical values of industriousness and
hard work. In the opening scene, Daniel is putting gel on his hands, ready to help his ewes
to lamb. The animals, which belong to Beulah breed, a Welsh native species with a
distinctive speckled black and white face, are one of Daniel’s main concerns. Readers can
almost feel and visualise the smell of the “grease of birth” (12) and the “fluids and
motherly efforts” (9) in the barn as Daniel’s arms draw the lamb from the ewe. This image
of birth however clashes with Daniel’s emotional turmoil. As readers gradually enter
Daniel’s mind, it becomes clear that sounds and smells continuously flow in his
consciousness. The smell of piss in the barn is intertwined to other animal smells. This
chain of sensory associations brings to Daniel’s mind the scent of his wife’s skin, thus
revealing a kind of “mammalian power” (16) that relates humans and animals. Despite
this vivid evocation, it is only at the end of the first chapter, however, that we realise that
Daniel was recently widowed.
Notably, the landscape around Daniel’s farm is imbued with fragments of noise and
other sensory perceptions that create a “strange ventriloquy of sounds” (12): the sucking
and clapping of the cattle, a barking fox, the wind coming over the trees, the sound of the
tides coming from the coast, the sigh of the sheep, the clap of the cattle’s feet in the mud,
the chains of the dog (11-13) are the various materialisations of human labor and animal
life. By foregrounding the sounds and smells of labor, The Dig illustrates the relevance of
agricultural tasks in a georgic fashion. The sounds and smells that permeate the Welsh
countryside carry several echoes of Virgil’s “scent of heat at bay” (47) in Book 3 (l. 210)
or “the smell of muck” (61) in Book 4 (l. 49). However, Jones complicates the sonic texture
of the rural landscape that, as Daniel states, can be said to perform “some measureless
whiteness in the air” (The Dig 13). These sounds produce “some primitive hushed whisper
of the performance of vast things” (13), disclosing hidden connections between the rural
landscape and the desolation that characterises the lives of the characters. The sounds
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and smells that reverberate through the air seem to be timeless, carrying an ancientness
reflected also on Daniel himself who “could be a man of any age” (9). This impression of
sensory interconnection chimes with Goodman’s reading of the georgic mode as motif
infused with an “unpleasurable feeling” (3; emphasis in original) where the noise of living
conveys a sense of “disturbance in affect and related phenomena that we variously term
perceptive, sensorial or affective” (3-4). Affective bonds are then established between the
sounds of the landscape and the emotional uncomfortableness of the characters. Daniel,
for instance, “was convinced he could sense illness in the air” (The Dig 28). While his
perceptions here are related to the animals in the farm, this uncanny feeling is eventually
juxtaposed to a disturbance “in relation to his own body and his personal understanding
of his health” (28). The lurking fear of disease contributes to a create a mood of despair in
a suggestive language reminiscent of Virgil’s words of warning in Book 3 (ll. 454-56): “the
harm is nourished and lives by concealment when the shepherd refuses to lay healing
hands on the sore and just sits there imploring the gods for better omens” (55). Here,
Virgil reminds us that diseases are natural phenomena and that humans must learn how
to deal with them.
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As a wounded character, because of the loss of his wife, Daniel becomes aware of
his own vulnerability in the encounter with fragile others and he strives to keep them safe
from harm. In The Dig, the theme of preservation carries a double meaning. On the one
hand, it entails care. In the course of the narrative, a strong relationship between humans
and animals makes Daniel inseparable from the landscape where he dwells. He witnesses
the birth of a malformed lamb, a brutal image that elicits “hopeless anger” (120), and he
feels protective towards a small weak black lamb that does not seem to put on weight. He
rubs the animal, “trying to bring some warmth into its muscles” (80), like a caring parent.
While his father would have killed the lamb, Daniel lacks his father’s pragmatism,
preferring instead to nurture the lamb. Daniel’s caring for animals recalls Virgil’s
invocation of cura which is used several times in the poem. In Book 1 (ll. 3 and 26), for
instance, it is evoked as “what care the cattle need” (3) and as “care for our lands” (4), thus
entailing a link among humans, animals and land. However, Daniel feels pity for the weak
lamb. His compassion and his amor then contrast with Virgil’s invitation, in Book 3 (ll. 96-
7 and 390), to reject an old or imperfect animal: not to pity “his sorry old age” (43) and
“look for another in your abounding flock” (53). In The Dig, this feeling of anxiety extends
also to the landscape. As Daniel notes, the countryside was changing “into a thing he didn’t
know intimately any more” (The Dig 37) because of the fires and the devastation caused
by illegal hunting of badgers. Both Daniel and the “big man” search beneath the ground:
Daniel thinking to his dead wife buried in the country churchyard and the man
exterminating rats for local farms and hunting badgers for money. Digging, hence,
discloses different ways of seeing the non-human world. If Daniel’s attachment to the land
is connoted by nurturing and caring attitudes, the cruel hunting of badgers by the “big
man” does equally represent, as Evie Wyld suggests in The New York Times, “violence
clearly born of the desire to belong” (Wyld). A “forgotten outcast rejected by society” (The
Dig 122), the “big man” is a perpetrator and a victim at the same time, his dwelling in the
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georgic world entailing a state of displacement. However, when badgers confront dogs in
cruel fights, the “big man” experiences a similar emotional sense of entrapment, recalling
the period he spent in the jail, feeling dizzy as badgers feel disoriented in the cage. By
contrast, Daniel’s protective touch with land and animals is hence completely different
from the cruel and illicit ways of the “big man.” This shows how human imbrication with
non-human is not always based on mutual respect and how dwelling can be precluded.
On the other hand, preservation carries the meaning of keeping memories alive.
This is the case, as already discussed before, of the sensory associations with lingering
smell that connects animals to humans. The evocative power of sensory elements is also
made manifest in objects and places which are endowed with the sentient power of
preserving memory. The reader of The Dig encounters mnemonic residues that mirror the
fragmentary mechanisms of human memory, emphasising how the cycles of life and death
are more like a continuum than two opposite worlds. Sentience, like intelligence and
consciousness are considered “necessary components of the measuring device” (Barad
336). However, as Barad notes, the recognition of our entanglements leads us to
reconsider the correlations between human and non-human. The malformed lamb, for
instance, with his monstrous head, conjures up Daniel’s wife, whose head had been
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smashed by a horse in the fatal accident. Daniel decides to throw the corpse of the lamb
in the wood, in the place where his wife died. Under a heavy rain, “some combination of
things about him balled into another memory” (The Dig 126): here, the loop of memory
discloses a sign of relationality in which the recollection of the departed remains alive.
From the perspective of material agency, memory becomes agential and recreates the
past when it is evoked. The land does not only have a language of its own, such as the cries
of the birds, the bleating of the lambs or the whiffs of wind through the wood. As Daniel
muses, a place “can remember” (113) or, as he specifies, a place “has to remember” (114).
The fragments of the past are encoded in the very landscape where a looming sense of
crisis joins humans, animals and places. The non-human thus becomes text and through
the motif of digging Jones metaphorically unearths the common vulnerability between
human and non-human.
Conclusion
Care, fears and attention to details lie at the core of Jones’ georgic world. To a
certain extent, The Long Dry and The Dig resonate with Virgil’s georgic allusions,
suggesting that technical skills, devotion, and experience are crucial to farming and
agriculture. As Batstone argues, the value of Virgil’s poem is that it reminds us of our
limitations and that our understanding is “larger than these pressing necessities and that
the contingencies of life have already implicated us in failure and greatness” (143). In
Fairer’s words, the georgic mode refracts a crisis in nature can be understood as “a more
fundamental crisis of humanity” (“Where Fuming Trees Refresh” 201) and this common
crisis informs Jones’ literary aesthetics. In certain respects, Jones juxtaposes divergent
forms of dwelling, edging towards what Head calls a sense of duty that entails “an
interrogation of the continuing relevance of what might be preserved” (17).
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In conclusion, loss and crisis abound in The Long Dry and in The Dig. Memories,
sounds and scents permeate the georgic world of Jones’ works, establishing a dialogue
with other’s life forms that transcend human life and human temporal scales. Through
metaphoric, synesthetic and figurative language, the novels I have explored here blur the
border between human and non-human, promoting a deep sense of care and relationality.
Shifting focalisation and temporal dislocation participate in a process that unveils the
entanglements of human and non-human, with vivid evocations of the material force of
the georgic mode. Moreover, by making past and present impinge on the lives of humans,
animals and places, the narratives lay emphasis on the persistence of memory and on a
sense of community that emerges from a shared condition of loss. I would then argue that
Jones’ georgic fiction reminds us that there is a sprawling mesh of interconnection
between human and non-human and, more importantly, that the seeds of our emotions
are to be found in the very moments of crisis. Through its generic instability and by
alerting readers to the sensory connections between human and non-human, Jones’
fiction sheds some light on an ethically-oriented way to practice solidarity, specifically in
our contemporary world where ecological questions require immediate attention.
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Submission received 1 January 2021 Revised version accepted 7 September 2021
Works Cited
Allan, Nina. “Stillicide by Cynan Jones, Review: Stunning Meditation on Climate Crisis.” The
Guardian, 23 October 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/23/stllicide-cynan-jones-review.
Accessed 6 June 2021.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.
Batstone, William W. “Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the Georgics.” The
Cambridge Companion to Virgil, edited by Fiachra Mac Góráin and Charles Martindale.
Second Edition. Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 193-215.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Bernhard, Stephanie. “The Dig: Cynan Jones.” Full Stop: Reviews, Interviews, Marginalia, 30
June 2015, https://www.full-stop.net/2015/06/30/reviews/stephanie-
bernhard/the-dig-cynan-jones/. Accessed 13 June 2021.
Fairer, David. “‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-Georgic’.”
---. “The Pastoral-Georgic Tradition.” William Wordsworth in Context, edited by Andrew
Bennett. Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 111–18.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2004.
Gifford, Terry. “The Environmental Humanities and the Pastoral Tradition.” Ecocriticism,
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Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by Christopher Schliephake, Lexington
Books, 2016, pp. 159-73.
Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Meditation of
History. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Head, Dominic. Modernity and the English Rural Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Heaney, Seamus. Death of a Naturalist. 1966. Faber & Faber, 1991.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson,
Blackwell, 2009.
Heller, Jakob C. “From Baroque Pastoral to the Idyll.” Ecological Thought in German
Literature and Culture, edited by Gabriele Dürbeck, Urte Stobbe, Hubert Zapf and Evi
Zemanek, Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 249-62.
Jones, Cynan. The Long Dry. Granta, 2006.
---. The Dig. Granta, 2014.
---. Cove. Granta, 2016.
---. Stillicide. Granta, 2019.
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Lavin, John. “‘The Story is God’: An Interview with Cynan Jones.” Wales Art Review, 2 April
2017, https://www.walesartsreview.org/the-story-is-god-an-interview-with-cynan-
jones/. Accessed 31 October 2020.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2010.
---. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2016.
Putnam, Michael. Vergil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics. Princeton, 1979.
Sayre, Laura. “How/to Make Fields Fertile”: Ecocritical Lessons from the History of Virgil’s
Georgics in Translation”. Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by
Thomas, Richard F. “The ‘Georgics’ of Resistance: From Virgil to Heaney.” Vergilius, vol.
47, 2001, pp. 117–47.
Virgil. Georgics. Translated by Janet Lembke, Yale University Press, 2005.
Wilkinson, L.P. The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey. Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Wyld, Evie. “The Dig, a Novel by Cynan Jones.” The New York Times, 15 May 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/books/review/the-dig-a-novel-by-cynan-
jones.html. Accessed 29 November 2020.
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Author: Bundschuh, Jessica Title: The ‘Interrupted Georgics’ of Mushrooms in Contemporary Irish Poetry
The ‘Interrupted Georgics’ of Mushrooms in Contemporary Irish

Poetry
Jessica Bundschuh
Universität Stuttgart, Germany
[email protected]
Abstract
The vitality of the georgic mode operates counter to inertia and disorder, driven by the initiative of
dynamic labor. Still, Edna Longley, in coining the term “interrupted georgics,” argues that the rupture of war
disrupting an agricultural scene defines the georgic. Accordingly, the precariousness of Ireland and
Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the EU Referendum in a (pre/post-)Brexit context acts as a
felicitous starting point for a generic revival of the georgic mode. Through a selection of contemporary
mushroom poems that meditate on this contested history over a 45-year period—Derek Mahon, “A Disused
Shed in Co. Wexford” (1973), Paul Muldoon, “Gathering Mushrooms” (1983), Ruth Carr, “Mushroom”
(1995), Chris Agee, “Mushrooming” (2003), Padraig Regan, “Rehydrating Mushrooms” (2018), and Ailbhe
Darcy, “Mushrooms” (2018)—this paper considers how mushrooms embody the georgic mode for the
purpose of ecological remediation. These lyric explorations of the Anthropocene under discussion replicate
a symbiotic relationship between the human and nonhuman world as situated within a georgic trajectory.
While Virgil does not mention in the Georgics cultivating, foraging, and gathering of mushrooms, these
activities, like beekeeping and farming, embody enduring georgic values of rugged curiosity and dogged
resilience. As the fruit of mycelial networks, lyrical mushrooms (re)distribute violence across agricultural
interconnection, to span specificity and outward scope. As a result, the mushroom becomes a ‘companion
species’ capable of assuming the role of co-teacher and co-imparter of knowledge to a poet-as-observer in
awe of its ingenuity.
Keywords: Fungi, companion species, georgic, Anthropocene, Ireland / Northern Ireland.
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Resumen
La vitalidad del modo geórgico, impulsada por la iniciativa del trabajo dinámico, contrarresta la
inercia y el desorden. Sin embargo, Edna Longley, al acuñar el término de las “geórgicas interrumpidas”,
sostiene que la ruptura creada por una guerra que interrumpe un escenario agrario es lo que define la poesía
geórgica. Por consiguiente, la precariedad de Irlanda y de Irlanda del Norte durante el conflicto norirlandés
y el referéndum sobre la Unión Europea en un contexto (pre/post-)Brexit funcionan como un punto de
partida oportuno para un resurgimiento genérico del modo geórgico. A través de una selección de poesía
contemporánea sobre las setas que refleja la historia violenta de Irlanda e Irlanda del Norte—Derek Mahon,
“A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” (1973), Paul Muldoon, “Gathering Mushrooms” (1983), Ruth Carr,
“Mushroom” (1995), Chris Agee, “Mushrooming” (2003), y Padraig Regan, Rehydrating Mushrooms”
(2018)—este artículo considerará cómo las setas personifican el modo geórgico por el propósito de
remediación ecológica. Estas exploraciones líricas del Antropoceno reproducen una relación simbiótica
entre los mundos humano y no humano al situarse en una trayectoria geórgica. Aunque Virgilio no menciona
en las Geórgicas el cultivo y la búsqueda de setas, estas actividades representan los valores geórgicos de una
fuerte curiosidad y una resiliencia persistente. Siendo fruto de las redes miceliales, los hongos
(re)distribuyen la violencia a través de la interconexión agraria, para abarcar especificidad y alcance
exterior. Como resultado, la seta se convierte en una ‘especie de compañía’ capaz de asumir el rol de co-
maestro impartiendo conocimiento a un poeta-observador impresionado por su ingenuidad.
Palabras clave: Fungi, especie de compañía, geórgico, Antropoceno, Irlanda /Irlanda del Norte.
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Reviving the Georgic Mode in an Irish and Northern Irish Context
In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
(2015), Anna Tsing establishes disturbance and precarity as the triggers for
environmental transformation: “disturbance is always in the middle of things,” wherein
one disturbance perpetually “follows other disturbances” (160). Such a “sensorial
phenomenon” of the Anthropocene marks the “experience of living in an increasingly
diminished and toxic world” (Davis and Turpin 3). Herein, the cultivating work of the poet
follows a trajectory begun with the agricultural labor of the farmer and the organic growth
of the mushroom, which may flourish in the absence of a farmer. In particular, mushrooms
in contemporary Irish and Northern Irish poetry emerge in medias res: midway through
an interaction with, and an attempted rejuvenating of, a landscape in crisis. Thus, readers
in search of scientifically-responsive literary enterprises may find a receptive partner in
this agent of bioconversion: the humble mushroom.
In “Mushrooms” (2018), Dublin poet Ailbhe Darcy takes on the Polar Vortex and
climate change in an address to her newborn child, the next generation:
Mushrooms could grow on a person all the same.
The body is a vertical farm […]
They say the way to fix this mess
is to cultivate one’s mushrooms and take up very little space. (28-29)
Darcy meets the seriousness of the environmental crisis with down-to-earth clarity:
mushrooms deserve our attention as models of interconnectivity within a larger
ecosystem, and as reminders of the fallacy of human exceptionalism. Further, Darcy
directs this urgency toward the future, since the speaker’s attempt to “fix this mess” is for
the benefit of the child addressee: “Your father and I have begun a new generation […]
We’ve handed on the weather, the body vulnerable and brief, / and the fact of mushroom
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farmers” (28). A corresponding note clarifies that Darcy’s mushroom farm refers to a
particularized agricultural setting, since she wrote the poem while residing for a duration
in the American Rust Belt and while visiting “the home of Rachel Swenie, who farms
mushrooms in Chicago” (69). Thus, this lyric from an Irish poet, written while in an
overseas landscape of heightened vulnerability—“Nights we lay awake in fear, expecting
visitors with firearms / and unfamiliar turns of phrase”—embeds both the speaker and
her child in a global ecological “apocalypse” (28). Within this animated locality, Darcy’s
tercets of persistent motion “flitter about” with an “insects’ whirr” “to whirligig in a
pocket” (28-9). They push readers swiftly from one line to the next, while maintaining a
vaster and outward-looking georgic gaze from which to consider the Anthropocene and
“ask if there might be some way back / to what we wanted when we first came” (28-9).
Darcy cultivates, here, a productive alliance between humans and nonhumans by
employing georgic poetics across a series of open-ended disturbances. Ultimately, Darcy
resumes the labors of the farmer through her textual mushroom production.
Speaking of mushroom champions, for the last decade and a half, the mycologist
Paul Stamets has become a leading advocate of fungi’s ability to remove toxins from the
environment. In his 2008 Ted Talk, Stamets refers to this process as “mycoremediation,”
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calling mushrooms “soil magicians” and “the grand molecular disassemblers of nature”
(00:046), due to their ability to transform organic waste into nutrition. Operating within
a similar interspecies frame, Tsing claims that “fungi are indicator species for the human
condition,” since “fungi are always companions to other species” (“Unruly” 144). From
this point of view, we may recognize the mushroom’s contribution in a literary context as
a co-teacher and co-imparter of knowledge to a poet-as-observer in awe of its ingenuity.
Admittedly, the shift from acknowledging the mushroom as a “soil magician” to a
“lyric magician” requires a nimble poetic genre. In a 2003 lecture delivered to the Royal
Irish Academy, Seamus Heaney describes his search for a genre that would remain robust
in the midst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, without becoming “vulnerable to
accusations of artificiality” (“Eclogue” 1). Certainly, one of the great strengths of the
didactic and down-to-earth georgic mode is its ability to sidestep artificiality through a
timely recognition of “changes in weather, economic pressures” and “physical toil” (Fairer
“Eco” 116). In this way, the genre responds with immediacy to the ongoing human-
engineered environmental crisis.
As this argument intends to demonstrate, the precariousness of Ireland and
Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the EU Referendum in a (pre/post-)Brexit
context acts as a felicitous starting point for a generic embrace of the georgic mode.
Although 2021 marks the 100-year anniversary of the Irish border and the birth of
Northern Ireland, this border zone remains a site of fragility and erupting violence. Still,
“mushrooms flourish” precisely here: “in agrarian seams: between fields and forest, and
at the margins of zones of cultivation” (Tsing, “Unruly” 151). As active representatives of
the georgic mode, mushrooms—capable of living and growing anywhere—may prompt
both an acknowledgment of environmental crisis, and a georgic optimism for
environmental rejuvenation. This argument contends that an encounter with the
Anthropocene benefits from borders allowed to remain blurred, messy, and symbiotic.
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Through a selection of mushroom poems spanning a 45-year-period—Derek Mahon, “A
Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” (1973), Paul Muldoon, “Gathering Mushrooms” (1983),
Ruth Carr, “Mushroom” (1995), Chris Agee, “Mushrooming” (2003), Padraig Regan,
“Rehydrating Mushrooms” (2018), and Ailbhe Darcy, “Mushrooms” (2018)—this paper
proposes a georgic revival as a means to facilitate ecological remediation along these
“agrarian seams.” Such a remediation is critical, not only amid the precarity of peace in
Ireland and Northern Ireland, but as a necessary response to it.
Marking the Interruption(s) Embedded in the Georgics
While Virgil does not mention in the Georgics the cultivating, foraging, and
gathering of mushrooms, these activities embody enduring georgic values of rugged
curiosity and dogged resilience, like beekeeping and farming. As David Fairer explains,
the georgic mode proceeds “through dissolution and loss to see renewal and fruition, and
to locate something ‘grateful’ […] in the hard labour of the fields” (“Eco” 112). Similarly,
the “positive thrust” of georgic dynamicism “won against inertia and disorder” acts with
“persistence, adaption, problem-solving,” and “initiative” (Fairer “Georgic” 464). Here,
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akin to a mycelial network of microscopic threads and its fruiting bodies of mushrooms,
the productively “resistant energy” of “recalcitrance” embedded in georgic contexts is
“forever on the move,” while remaining responsive to local environments in “a world in
process whose rewards are hard won,” fleeting, and “full of tension” (Fairer, “Eco” 111).
As Fairer’s characterization attests, the georgic mode is well-suited to the wearying
demands of a long-winded path to reconciliation among communities and the farmlands
they cultivate in the renewed and ongoing border conflict between Ireland and Northern
Ireland.
In choosing which English translation of Virgil’s the Georgics from which to quote,
my choice of Peter Fallon is quite deliberate. Aside from the beauty of his translation,
Fallon is a poet and the founder of The Gallery Press in County Meath, the pre-eminent
publisher of contemporary Irish poetry since 1970, having published, early in their
careers, both Mahon and Muldoon. Taking into account the translator’s biography,
Fallon’s sensitivity to Virgil’s representation of an agricultural land embroiled in civil war
is helpful. Indeed, Fallon explains in his “Translator’s Note” that his “partiality towards
the Georgics” arises out of his own coming of age “in the tender aftermath of ‘Troubles’”
where “Virgil’s delineation of the griefs and glories of a land in which people tried to found
their lives, while their days were adumbrated by a civil war, was a touchstone” (xxxiv).
Thus, a personal stake in the historical context of Virgil’s epic acts as a point of entry.
Herein, the genre of the georgic straddles a diverse set of historical contexts, reinforcing
its validity as a genre worthy of revival.
Focusing on both the material conditions of the original Latin text and an English
translation highlights the transhistorical connection between the disturbances of civil war
(then and now), and the “new landscape assemblages” that Tsing suggests may emerge
from a “layering of global- and-local, expert-and-vernacular knowledge layers”
(“Mushroom” 160-1). It is here that we locate sites of joint “livability” where “[p]recarious
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living is always an adventure” (Tsing, “Mushroom” 163). So, too, in the midst of a fraught
history, the georgic mode remains “collaborative and progressive” and “organic, adaptive,
ingenious, skillful, and useful,” even if war, or other tragedies, halt these “constructive
works of peace” (Fairer, “Georgic” 459). From this dual perspective of living, then, the
poems under consideration may actively participate in a larger Irish and Northern Irish
history, while nonetheless burdened by an immediate tragedy.
Indeed, an interruption in the form of a violent suspension of agricultural labors
concludes Book 1 of Virgil’s the Georgics:
For right and wrong are mixed up here, there’s so much warring everywhere,
evil has so many faces, and there is no regard for the labours
of the plough. Bereft of farmers, fields have run to a riot of weeds.
Scythes and sickles have been hammered into weapons of war. (1.504-8)
Here, Virgil offers readers an example of “interrupted georgics,” a term Edna Longley
coins to describe a poem in which war “infiltrates an agricultural scenario” (466). Longley
even claims that “the interruption may define the georgic” (468). Thus, the skill set of
ingenuity and problem-solving traditionally the particular purview of hard-won
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agricultural expertise and hands-on experience can, likewise, guide other multispecies
interactions born out of interruption, like that of literary enterprises.
The interruption in georgic productivity may additionally be precisely what
facilitates a singleminded drive to rebound after trauma, like that of Virgil’s rural Italy
recovering from civil war. Virgil transfers this drive into his four-part structure of the
Georgics, which establishes a recuperative pattern through the proximity of endings and
beginnings: from the pestilence of “a fester of pustules” “gnawing” “on cursed limbs”
(3.564-6), to the sweetness of bees: “Which brings me to heaven’s gift of honey, or manna,
if you will” (4.1). So goes the swift shift of tonality between Books 3 and 4. The latter of
which cushions, “far from the ways of the wind” (4.9), the prior intrusion of tragedy with
its reassuringly formal address: Virgil’s narrator directs readers (and the addressee) to a
protected alcove that evades, for a short term, the incessant “wind” of destruction. Here,
the reader and addressee may recharge in preparation for the possibility of an unforeseen
event characteristic to any agricultural endeavor.
Practicing Verbal Mediation: The ‘Arts of Noticing’
Poems about ecological vulnerability that attempt to facilitate remediation—

rather than a nostalgic sigh for times gone by—nonetheless need the hopeful
expansiveness of the georgic. The didactic georgic mode values persistence and
adaptability as skills learned through a careful observation of an environment’s potent
rejuvenation. In this context, nuance and texture emerge. Sam Solnick contends that
poems suited to the Anthropocene should teach readers how to sharpen their ability to
perceive the “dynamic and emergent,” which is “contingent on shifting conditions” (211).
In this regard, Tsing’s celebration of the “arts of noticing” (“Mushroom” 39) resonates well
with Solnick’s call to readers. Thankfully, Tsing is not deterred by those who deem the
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practice of noticing “archaic,” since a slow and steady observation is precisely what draws
out the authentically messy stories of “interrupting geographies and tempos”
(“Mushroom” 37) that productively challenge scientific research questions through their
literary digressions, like those on display in this selection of mushroom poems.
The “arts of noticing” (“Mushroom” 39) within a mushroom context may
productively start with what biologist Merlin Sheldrake, in Entangled Life: How Fungi
Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (2020), explains as the
omnipresent “master concept” of the “’web of life’ [that] underpins modern scientific
conceptions of nature,” namely, “the idea that all things are interconnected.” He regrets
that it may have “collapsed into a cliché.” Despite its overuse as a concept, however, it
cannot be denied that mycelial fungi are the very shapes they inhabit; in other words,
“[t]hey are flexible networks that ceaselessly remodel themselves” (76). Do note that my
intention throughout this paper is not to sloppily conflate fungal structures (mushrooms
and mycelia), but to acknowledge their vital interconnection, mirroring the very shape of
fungi themselves. Further, my privileging of mushrooms—the fruiting bodies of fungi—
responds not only to a similar focus in the poetic texts themselves. It is also a nod to the
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unseen and below-ground manifestations only hinted at by the presence of their above-
ground counterparts.
To better establish a thread between what is seen and unseen, above ground and
below, it is useful to describe how fungi inhabit space. To do so, though, one must assume
a position anterior to that of the human: Fungi feed by digesting “the world where it is,”
to “absorb it into their bodies.” That is, while humans and animals put food into their
bodies, “fungi put their bodies in food.” Further, the more of the world fungi come in
contact with—their long and branched ‘bodies’ composed of a single cell wall—“the more
they can consume” (Sheldrake 57). Evocatively, mycelium “decants itself into its
surroundings,” like water, constantly shapeshifting as a “living, growing opportunistic
investigation—speculation in bodily form” (Sheldrake 58). Through this unpredictable
expansion, fungi employ pressure to break through barriers, speedily and stealthily
entering a new territory.
In tracking this discursive nonhuman history, as above, it is possible to remain
open to an object-relations approach characterized by “multi-layered portraits of
ecological relationality in the Anthropocene” (Ronda 341), where positions remain “non-
linear” and “recursive, rather than developmentally teleological,” fostering “ongoing
practices rather than singular experiences” (Ronda 340). Margaret Ronda, in adopting
this approach in her work on ecological affect, aligns her argument both with the textured
georgic encounter of farming the land day-after-day, and with Tsing’s encouragement to
frankly acknowledge our joint human and nonhuman ecological precarity, a result of
unavoidable interdependence. Above all, Tsing’s declaration that “human nature is an
interspecies relationship” (“Unruly” 144) remains central to the lyrical investigations to
follow.
A poem’s remedial value relies on its ability to make connections experientially
palpable for the reader, like the shapeshifting movement of mycelium. A poet’s material,
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after all, is language, not soil, as Kevis Goodman reminds us: the Georgics is a “work of
verbal mediation” that highlights “the relationship between words and things” and
“linguistic control” (42-3). Granted, while some linguistic limitations inherent to
ecological mediation remain intact, those experiments situated within a georgic trajectory
are frequently unsettled, knotty, and vulnerable, yet engaged and future-looking. As a
result, the poetic strategies under discussion here of juxtaposition, metaphor, and
intertextuality, among others, serve the larger objectives of a mediated poetic
engagement with the nonhuman, rooted in humility and observation. In a nutshell, these
individual strategies work in tandem to (re)create a formal experience for the reader, a
sum greater than its parts.
To better contextualize this verbal mediation in the Georgics, let us revisit an
example discussed above in which Virgil interrupts the labor in the fields, at the end of
Book 1, with mention of “hostilities in Germany” and “Neighboring cities [that] renege on
what they pledged and launch attacks” (1.509-10). From this image of terror, in which
“scythes and sickles” have been repurposed into “weapons of war,” Virgil propels himself
forward with the famous simile of the chariot driver, Octavian, out of control:
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the whole world’s at loggerheads, a blasphemous battle,

as when, right from the ready, steady, go, chariots quicken on a track
until the driver hasn’t a hope of holding the reins and he’s carried away
by a team that pays heed to nothing, wildly away and no control.
(1.511-14; my emphasis)
Some 450 lines earlier in Book 1, Octavian harnesses this same chariot-plough to create
order (not disorder) in his agricultural landscape; therein, Virgil, ever the pedagogical
poet, offers instructions of how to assemble a chariot-plough from an “eight-foot pole” of
“pliant elm,” “for the tiller a length of beech to steer” (1.170-75).
Virgil’s decision to merge the chariot and the plough is politically motivated,
despite the agricultural context. This hybrid “unites in one image the deeply rooted
Roman myth” (218) of the quest for structure, as Virgil scholar Robert McKay Wilhelm
claims: “field and forum, vines and civilization, horses and men, ploughman and chariot-
statesman who, in unity, struggle to quiet the unbridled forces threatening both the
georgic and the political worlds” (218). The seminal image of the chariot-plough unites
the above listed “network of associations […] all striving for control” (McKay Wilhelm
230). As a result, the careening chariot at the end of Book 1 acts both as a simile for the
state following the assassination of Caesar—the chariot-statesman—and for the
deteriorating condition of the agricultural world, against which Octavian and the poet
both struggle when a sword replaces a plough. Significantly, Virgil’s metaphor remains
expansive, while still valuing the local, such that Virgil does not rob the scene of its
actuality; in this regard, the Georgics is a model for the Irish lyrics at hand, which
assiduously evoke the entangled movements of fungi slipping through barriers, to span
specificity and scope.
Echoing Outward: Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
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As the initial stopping-off point in our Irish and Northern Irish mushroom
trajectory, the bifurcated scope of Derek Mahon’s much-discussed “A Disused Shed in Co.
Wexford” (emphasis added) becomes immediately clear in the title. Mahon commits
himself to a particularized portrait of “lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels, / dog
corners of dog burials” (34). The outward expansion, thereafter, begins with an
otherworldly opening of the “creaking lock / and creak of hinges; magi, moonmen, /
powdery prisoners of the old regime” (35). Thus, Mahon’s mushroom metaphor functions
within two distinct frameworks: a mycelial network, on the one hand, and the sectarian
violence in Northern Ireland, on the other.
Adrian Frazier contends that there are few post-Yeats Irish poems on which all
anthologies of contemporary Irish poetry agree as canonical expect one: Derek Mahon’s
“A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” written shortly after Bloody Sunday in 1972. Frazier
argues that Mahon’s poem has been granted this honor because of its ability to absorb
whatever historical conflict a reader chooses to invoke, and thus gives back “a full,
complex understanding of history, of the weak, the voiceless, the sentient” (200). Indeed,
Mahon dedicates the poem to his friend and novelist J.G. Farrell, author of the ironic Big
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House novel, Troubles (published in 1970 and belatedly awarded the Lost Man Booker
Prize in 2010), set in the midst of the 1922-3 Irish Civil War at the Majestic Hotel with its
abandoned sheds and burned-down buildings, the setting for Mahon’s poem.
Mahon’s “voiceless” representatives of history—the “lost people of Treblinka and
Pompeii”—are a shed of abandoned mushrooms, rediscovered 50 years later in the midst
of the Troubles:
deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
among the bathtubs and the washbasins
a thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole […]
What should they do there but desire? (34)
Mahon’s mushrooms, their “pale flesh flaking / into the earth” as they “lift frail heads,”
“are begging us” “to speak on their behalf” (35). Mahon’s desire in this poem to find a
literary response adequate to the demands of a fraught historical correlative is not new
to Ireland. Consider how hesitant W.B. Yeats had been to publish his now ubiquitous
“Easter, 1916,” waiting four years beyond the events of the Easter Rising, out of concern
for which parties, among many contenders, he was bound to insult.
Mahon explains in a 2000 interview with poet Eamon Grennan that when he
“write[s] about the dead of Treblinka and Pompeii […] included in that are the dead of
Dungiven and Magherafelt,” referencing sites in County Derry of sectarian violence. To
uphold his conviction that “you couldn’t take sides,” Mahon thus avoids “writ[ing]
directly” about the Troubles by instead grounding his mushroom colony, abandoned by
“the gravel-crunching, interminable departure / of the expropriated mycologist,” in a
larger community of a “flash-bulb firing squad” beyond their narrow “trickle of masonry”
(34-5). In this indirect meditation on the Northern Ireland conflict, then, Mahon returns
to the abandoned scene drawn by the calls of “a thousand mushrooms,” “’Save us, save us,’
they seem to say” (34-5), in contrast to a dispossessed mycologist who “never came back”
(34).
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Mahon’s poem is a testament to reciprocal and responsive interactions between
humans and nonhumans. The opening line, “Even now there are places where a thought
might grow,” immediately establishes the potentiality for communication and expansion,
“a kind of panorama of panoramas, an ecstatic dilation which vibrates with distant voices”
(Redmond 433). Thus, the poem establishes a corridor for growth, beginning with an
“echo” that might have been “trapped for ever,” but “even now” relinquishes the “ghost of
a scream,” despite having long been “racked by drought” (34-5). In essence, the georgic
emblem of the mushroom has the power to resonate with those outside of its closed
society, expanding a formerly cut-off network through Mahon’s mushrooms poignantly
ventriloquized in the final line, “’let not our naive labours have been in vain!’” (35). This
final echo of mushroom-speak prevents readers from leaving Mahon’s poetic frame
without first pausing and noticing, as Tsing insists is important. In an essay on the nuclear
catastrophe following Hiroshima (a setting of import in Carr’s poem), Jean-Luc Nancy
urges us to “remain exposed,” like Mahon’s mushrooms, amid environmental crises,
“think[ing] about what is happening” (8), while acknowledging those in a state of either
arrival or departure.
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Questioning Inheritance: Paul Muldoon’s “Gathering Mushrooms”
The historical reach of Paul Muldoon’s “Gathering Mushrooms,” like Mahon’s “A

Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” is expansive, described as “a landmark for younger Irish
writers,” and an “essential equipment for living” (Frazier 200). Reaching backward in
time, Muldoon acknowledges an ancient relationship between farming and combat. Here,
he follows Virgil, who arranges vines like soldiers in formation in Book 2 of the Georgics.
That is, Muldoon refers to his mushroom-farmer father as an “ancient warrior / before
the rising tide,” who will work steadily, “without breaking rhythm” (106). He, like a
soldier, wears a general-issue uniform: “the same old donkey-jacket / and the sawn-off
waders” with a “peaked cap,” and commands regulation gear: “a knife, two punnets, a
bucket” (105). As Fran Brearton explains, Muldoon’s
father becomes both a symbol of the past and a trustworthy starting point for the leap into
an unknown future. Patrick Muldoon stands as representative of a particular way of life—
not the academic or intellectual life, but a more instinctive rural stability: mushrooms, but
not magic mushrooms. (48)
This representative mushroom farmer heralds from a distant age: a warrior from long ago
who “has opened the gates of Troy” (105). Intertextually, then, Muldoon’s father opens
the gates in Mahon’s elegy for the “wordless” mushroom collective, “begging us” “not to
close the door again” (Mahon 35). Muldoon’s speaker, too, assists the agricultural efforts
of the father: “We have taken our pitchforks to the wind” (105). Working in tandem,
together they embody georgic labors of physical toil and dynamic motion:
The mushroom shed is windowless, wide,
its high-stacked wooden trays
hosed down with formaldehyde […]
to that first load of horse manure.
Barley straw. Gypsum. Dried blood. Ammonia. (105)
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In this description, Muldoon revels in the uncomfortable details of a food product that
rises from a grave of “formaldehyde,” “horse manure,” “dried blood,” and “ammonia.” This
“windowless” “shed,” in which the father tirelessly works, “so on and so forth till kingdom
come,” transmogrifies, in the final stanza, into the dirty protests of IRA prisoners in Long
Kesh. Across these five interconnected sonnets, the father spans a historical divide, from
ancient Troy, to the H-Block of Long Kesh prison and its 1981 Irish hunger strike.
Interposed mid-way into this trajectory, in the second sonnet, is another georgic
interruption of “the fire bomb / that sent Malone House sky-high” (105), a reference to
the 1972 IRA firebomb in Belfast, which destroyed the entire collection the Ulster
Museum’s textile collection. An assault on woven textiles is an assault on networked
structures already “sodden with rain” in the first sonnet, in the form of the mother’s
“hand-embroidered” “tablecloth” “flapping through the yard” (105), like a white
handkerchief of reconciliation, ignored for now.
Muldoon reclaims the handkerchief image in the final sonnet, vocalized by the
speaker’s friend hallucinating on magic mushrooms, who urges appeasement: “let straw
and dung give a spring to your step,” “lie down with us now,” and “wrap / yourself in the
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soiled grey blanket of Irish rain / that will, one day, bleach itself white” (108). Just as Virgil
transforms Octavian’s plough into a war chariot and then back into a tool of agriculture,
so, too, Muldoon’s linen—part of Belfast’s heralded past—re-establishes a mycelial
connection of conciliation, despite its violent manifestations earlier in the poem. That is,
initially, the linen is merely a soggy mess on the mother’s line; then it becomes political as
the destroyed treasure in a cultural archive—leaving the Keeper of Applied Art at the
Ulster Museum in anguish: “We might have wept with Elizabeth McCrum” (105). Lastly,
the linen transforms into another object of precarity, as a blanket garb to replace the
displaced Long Kesh prison uniform. Reconstituted in these final lines, the tablecloth
regains its earlier “whiteness” in georgic perseverance, despite the “Irish rain”: “Lie down
and wait.” Here, it is linguistically webbed together by the heroic couplet off-rhyme of
“white” and “wait” (106).
Granted, Muldoon, in his speaker’s interlude into drug use—“we were thinking
only of psilocybin” (105)—refuses to directly accept the patriarchal line of mushroom
farming. Still, the Trojan horse from the first stanza, a mythical stand-in for the sneaky
ability to outwit a nemesis in war, becomes absorbed into the speaker’s psychedelic trip
on magic mushrooms, now cut free from the horse’s limbs of motion: “my head had grown
into the head of a horse” (106). Thus, like the image of the Trojan horse, one moment and
one object/subject embeds itself in another: the speaker has imaginatively become the
father’s tool, a device for intrusion into enemy territory. And, thus, the power of the
mycelial web is as active as ever, overcoming rupture to reinstate georgic values of order
and hope for the future:
[…] Your only hope
is to come back. If sing you must, let your song
tell of treading your own dung. (106)
The final message balances solitary aesthetic efforts of “your song” against a recollection
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of multiple communal memories of tragedy. Ultimately, Muldoon affirms his own
identifications amid Northern Ireland’s conflicting alliances; thus, the mushrooms that
initiate the journey never become universally static materializations.
“Gathering Mushrooms” is, ultimately, Muldoon’s linguistic equivalent to his
father’s art of “coaxing” (106) mushrooms from wooden trays, to buckets and punnets; in
this regard, it is similar to how “Digging”—positioned as the first poem in Selected Poems
1966-1987—is Seamus Heaney’s verbal response to both his father’s soil plotting and his
grandfather’s turf cutting. Consider Heaney’s infamous comparison in “Digging” of a spade
to a “squat pen” that “rests” “snug as a gun” (3), a dangerous parallel in Northern Ireland
in 1964. Both Muldoon and Heaney salute the natural world through their emotional
adjacency to an agricultural lineage that grounds their poetic projects. As a result, they
may straddle material and generational divides, much like the mushroom and its mycelial
parentage, above ground and below.
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Oscillating Genres: Chris Agee’s “Mushrooming”
One path to simultaneously negotiate both topographic and literary inheritance is

through genre. That is, an engagement with inherited genres, like georgic and pastoral,
affords the poet an opportunity to bring them into kinetic interaction, as Chris Agee does
in “Mushrooming.” Herein, Agee embraces Tsing’s charge to practice the art of noticing by
both temporally speeding up and slowing down the landscape under observation. Agee,
as a result, provides a response for how form can function as a site to negotiate an
Anthropocene aesthetics that fosters “forms of cooperation that escape” a “self-
destructive logic” (Horn and Bergthaller 8). Without evading the underlying awareness of
occupying a damaged planet (explored by Tsing et al. in Arts of Living on a Damaged
Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene), Agee immediately initiates an escape in the first
stanza. Here, the speaker witnesses a pastoral slowing down of time: “Nothing stills the
woods to silence / like the aftermath of rains,” and then continues with “the meadow-
crickets quenched, / the boughs and saplings of birch and pine […] shining / here and
there with sunshafts from parted cloud.” In this atemporal space, “time inspired,” readers
enter the grandness of mythology: “The Greeks felt the mystery of Zeus, / the lightning’s
muse” (51). The arrival of Zeus’s lightning bolts, however, signals an oncoming shift in
genre and temporality.
Once we arrive at Agee’s fourth tercet, the “dark labour of fungi” ensues and the
scene becomes more accelerated. That is, Agee replaces the “mottle[d]” light and
“desultory plops” of rain from the first and second stanzas with the dynamic action of
fungi: “Vicarious as the uprush / of poetry, the delicate caps of mushrooms / thrust
through the earth’s rot” (51). The georgic mode, in this instance, powerfully aligns with
the represented fungi, such that the “meandering wall” on which lichen and Indian pipe
mushroom sprout is a real-world stand-in for “Frost’s art” (51), recalling Robert Frost’s
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“Mending Wall,” another North American equivalency. Over the course of the poem,
readers crisscross mycelial-like from “the Eden of amateur mycology,” listing Adam-like
the many lyrical names of mushrooms, “Chanterelle, Thimble-cap, Velvet-footed Pax” and
“Voluminous Milky,” to the ghosts of ecological destruction: “fishstink and profusion of
latex” (51). In both modes, Agee freely shows readers his cards: he is a poet looking at
mushrooms as a poet would, through the wide lens of indirection, roping together
semblance and actuality.
By doubling the genres on hand, Agee expands his poem’s potentiality for
ecological regeneration: “half-masked by a layer of leaves, / by mossy vestiges of
treetrunks” (51). Further, he seeks a language of mushrooming, “a language all of its own
/ neither prose nor song, / not animal, yet not quite plant” (52). Let us recall Mahon’s
mushrooms that similarly seek to be heard in their own language. Both poets, practicing
the object-relations approach of noticing, provide a space in which companion species
may define the auditory textures of their own narratives.
Over the course of his twelve tercets—and two sets of pastoral/georgic
oscillations—readers witness Agee teasing out whether genre or genus defines the
language of fungi. In his attempt to classify “their svelte ethereal flesh” (52), he ultimately
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lands on fungi’s speed and adaptive capacity. That is, in the final tercet, the mushrooms,
“one-day miracles of the world’s design” (52), transform under the poet’s gaze. Agee
structures the final line as a simile, contending that mushrooms are “like haikus in the
woodland epic of birth and decay” (52). In this final gesture, the poem calls for balance
between genres at two ends of the length spectrum: the haiku and the epic. By challenging
genre boundaries, Agee, likewise, challenges the traditional separation between
agricultural processes and literary practices, and between the sciences and the
humanities, which is critical to a serious engagement with the Anthropocene.
Connecting Strangers: Padraig Regan’s “Rehydrating Mushrooms”
Just as Agee underpins his poem’s argument across mycelial interconnection, so,
too, does Padraig Regan establish a formal structure to replicate the nonhuman world.
Regan begins “Rehydrating Mushrooms” by literally ‘decanting’ (in Sheldrake’s
terminology) the mushroom into the poetic space. In other words, the movements of the
mushroom (and its mycelial parentage) track the poem’s development, advancing
stealthily underground and underfoot, from stanza to stanza. The first couplet begins with
a concession in continuous present that directs readers to a future moment, “I’m thinking
of how mushrooms will haunt a wet log.” Here, the speaker employs an admission as a
wedge into a simile: “like bulbous ghosts; / of how a mushroom may be considered a
travesty of a flower / in a way that a wolf may be a travesty of a grandmother” (81). This
first observation, then, enables the speaker to productively consider the equivalence, or
“travesty” thereof, between things: mushrooms to ghosts and then flowers, and wolves to
grandmothers.
Regan’s initial simile establishes a pattern of movement the rest of “Rehydrating
Mushrooms” will continue to sustain. Two stanzas after their natural appearance on a log,
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Regan returns to the literal act of “adding water to mushrooms,” rejuvenating the
mushroom’s potential for reverie. It is here that readers encounter another simile, “like
dull confetti,” and so begins the transformation from edible mushrooms, to a non-edible
object in the poet’s toolkit, namely paper. Significantly, the paper is shredded. Thus, when
the “swirling” mushrooms “begin to print / themselves onto the water, their flavor” (81;
emphasis added), the word “print” gains an additional resonance. In effect, it can now
“imprint” itself, or leave its mark. In this fashion, the shredded paper reconstitutes itself,
like the rehydrated mushrooms, to become a site for “printing” and merging, similar to
the mushrooms that leech their taste into the water. Herein, both objects shapeshift.
Thereafter, the paper simile appears once more, reinforced yet again by water, in the form
of rain for which the speaker has long awaited and now “greets” “in a tracing-paper-thin
dress, no tights.” With tights absent, the rain “falls on [the speaker’s] head” and “seeps
into” “undisclosed locations” (81).
An oscillation between the mediating work of the poet—composing by hand on
paper—and the powerful infusion of the reconstituted mushrooms is suited to Regan’s
long-lined couplets of paired and elongated interaction. This is the crux of the georgic
genre: Virgil’s agricultural project, if we recall Goodman’s claim above, is a mediation of
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the physical work of a poet who constructs an interspecies frame (akin to Regan’s
grandmother and wet log). Further, Goodman explains that the Georgics
are as much about the tending of words as they are about agriculture and other forms of
terriculture: they are concerned not only with words (verba) as bearers of things (res) but
also with words as things, exerting friction within representation and requiring labor and
care. (Goodman 11)
In this regard, taking nature seriously entails taking language seriously, as well. Words
literally are carriers, imprinted things, engaged in mycelial sprawl in this lyric selection in
which mushrooms prominently feature. Ultimately, Regan’s work commits to
intertwining species, images, and moods to simulate a mycelial footprint of expansion.
After signaling a vastness in the first line in which the mushroom appears in
Regan’s poetic space, it reconfigures itself. That is, it transitions from peaceful observation
to “bulbous ghosts.” In this ‘decanted’ image, the speaker—the human agent and source of
responsibility—becomes the point of interconnection:
[…] Personally, I don’t
believe in ghosts, but it has been three months since a man was shot
in a street just next to where I live & now it seems the ghosts are everywhere:
in clouds that stay around the fringes of the sky, in a blur in a photograph
when the camera jerked away, in a thumbprint smudge on my glasses lens. (81)
The preponderance of mushrooms cropping up on the “wet log” relies, additionally, on

the presence of water, already engaged in transformative work. Let us recall Tsing’s claim
(expanding on Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Others, 2003) that mushrooms are a ‘companion species.’ Indeed,
companionship guides the series of peripheral sightings that follow, from a “thumbprint
smudge,” “a blur” in a photograph, a fringy “cloud” in the sky about to rain, to the ghosts
“everywhere,” even though the speaker claims to not believe in their existence. Further,
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the shooting to which the poem refers is that of Stephen Carson, murdered on February
25th, 2016 in the bathroom of his Walmer Street apartment in Belfast (Regan interview).
Once violence enters the poetic space, it hovers like a mycelial underpresence
across the couplets, observed by the speaker in even the smallest distractions. In each of
these instances, readers encounter a point of contact between two ancillary forces or
objects along an “agrarian seam,” observable in a blur or a smudge. Thus, the murder of a
stranger in Belfast occupies the poem’s metaphorical plane, like a mushroom spore print
and lurking tragedy. Finally, in the final image, the rain falls, its long-awaited arrival
recalling the last section of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), since a “week without
rain is enough to set” the speaker’s “skin ticking.” As we have come to expect in a poem of
interspecies parallels, Regan compares the rain’s falling to a human product, namely, “a
bolt of gauze.” Thus, rain arrives both as a “bolt” of thunder and as a bundle of “gauze”
meant for tending to wounds; the latter reference returns readers to Stephen Carson shot
“three months since,” still hovering after his introduction five couplets earlier (81).
Above all, “Rehydrating Mushrooms” honors interconnection between strangers,
human and nonhuman. In the overlapping space between those strangers, an intimacy of
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compassion flourishes, since as the rain reaches the speaker’s body, so, too, it “seeps into
the water table,” passing through other “bodies,” we are told. The mushroom, therefore,
effectively proposes a means of remediation across an interruption of violence by
channeling water to hydrate the mushroom both for human consumption and for a
nonhuman reconstitution of its earlier natural form. Despite this nonhuman remediation,
though, the poet cannot erase that Stephen Carson was needlessly shot while dialing 999
in the presence of his partner and son by those driven by criminal vengeance (McDonald).
The poem’s memorialization and linguistic reconstitution of this dead stranger—Regan’s
neighbor and fellow resident of Belfast—becomes even more important for its ability to
step across distance. Further, the resulting georgic elegy is not for Carson alone, as the
last grounding sentence suggests: “It is the first Monday of June 2016,” recalling the last
grounding line in Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” (1976), an example of North
American expansion: “and it was still the fifth / of February, 1918” when the child speaker
suddenly remembers “The War was on / Outside” (161). For Regan’s speaker, similarly,
the month is significant because it conjoins another ‘war,’ the shooting of 49 far-off
individuals, yet interlinked in mycelial fashion, at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida
on June 12th, 2016. This tragedy is also set against the backdrop of the EU Referendum on
June 24th, 2016 in which Northern Ireland voted, to no avail, to remain in Europe, hoping
to stay connected to a larger whole (Regan interview). However, within the dramatic
context of the poetic frame, the speaker alludes to these interconnections on the “first
Monday of June 2016” (81), that is, on June 6th; thus, the speaker still stands before all that
is to follow in that tragic month, establishing another point of intersection across
temporalities, as Regan has also done across spatiality and species. In the end, readers are
left with a strong sense of “language consciously at work,” since, as Fairer explains, “the
decorum of georgic is the opposite of easy and refined.” In Regan’s frame, likewise,
“progress is won through resistance” (“Georgic” 467) and the dogged work of poetic
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mediation.
Embedded Tragedies: Ruth Carr’s “Mushrooms”
Ruth Carr, like Padraig Regan, begins “Mushrooms” in the act of tending to, and
establishing a relationship with, the mushroom as a material manifestation of both
violence and remediation. Once again, verbal meditation begins as the mushroom comes
in contact with its sustaining companion of water: “I am rising milk white mushrooms /
under the tap” (54). The mushroom in Regan’s fashioning begins in its natural landscape,
only to enter the domestic space once the poet transports it there (and, once ingested by
the speaker, the mushroom later returns indirectly to the rain). In contrast, in Carr’s
poetic arc, the mushroom begins in the domestic space, as an agricultural product being
prepped for a meal (like Regan’s), to then return to its agricultural habitat in the
penultimate line: “I visualize a mushroom field at dawn.” Over the course of the poem,
Carr’s mushroom, yet again in parallel to Regan, ruptures the domestic scene. As a result,
the poet accommodates a grounded georgic expansiveness, like Mahon who links
“Treblinka” and “Pompeii” (35) on the same line.
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If we track the network of associations that intersect Carr’s “Mushroom,” it begins

with the whiteness of the mushroom the speaker cleans. This color, likewise of import for
Muldoon’s trajectory, reminds the speaker of a nearby infant, the addressee of the poem,
whose “mouth opens birdlike / To gulp all the world it can” (54; emphasis added). Here is
an animal reversal of Sylvia Plath’s infant in “Morning Song,” whose “mouth opens clean
as a cat’s” (157; emphasis added). This bears mentioning since Plath’s 1959 poem,
“Mushrooms”—“So many of us!” (139)—is the North American prologue that initiates this
Irish poetic mushroom trajectory, as a comparison of it against Mahon’s poem, published
over a decade thereafter, bears out. In this way, Mahon establishes a transatlantic
expansiveness, like Darcy’s poem at the outset, echoing across a jumbled temporal and
spatial interconnectivity. (Indeed, both David Kennedy [Irish Studies Review, 2010] and
James McElroy [An Irish Quarterly Review, 2018] establish Plath as Mahon’s textual
antecedent.) From the open mouth of the child (Plath’s and Carr’s), the speaker witnesses
another white object: “A sliver of white in all that pink— / The first tooth is through” (54);
next, she leaps to another vulnerable subject, the “girl’s voice on the airwaves,” speaking,
“Fifty years on,” about the after-effects of Hiroshima, “Shocked by the hole / Where her
sister’s cheek should be, / She can see right through to the teeth” (54). This startling image
breaks the poem apart, forcing readers to pause ‘exposed’ and implicated in a way that
Nancy would honor. Similarly, Karen Barad contends that a connection between
“terrestrial and atmospheric mushrooms” exists in an “uncanny material topology” in
which each inhabits the other, like that of “radiotrophic mushrooms thriv[ing] in nuclear
contaminated areas” (116).
Georgic-like in its precision and specificity, the white of the mushroom—aligned
initially with the goodness of milk—introduces its very (embedded) interruption. That is,
Carr transposes the mushroom into an image of horrific violence, specifically a nuclear
mushroom cloud: “I am watching skin peel like paint / Plants recoil into themselves /
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Seeking their own shadow” (55). This hole in the sister’s cheek, the speaker declares,
“Fragments everything,” such that “Thousands of splinters mosaic her child form, / This
is the nuclear act embedded in flesh” (54). Here, Regan’s “dull confetti” turns maliciously
into a “mosaic” of “splinters.”
Yet again, the vocation (and intervention) of the poet becomes significant when
the poet “visualizes” directly onto “the blank white space that is a mushroom” in the final
stanza. This “blank white space,” like the page on which the poem is printed, follows the
piercing description of the girl on the airwaves. In her attempt to regain equilibrium, the
poet, thereby, overlays her literary labors on top of agricultural labors: “I visualize a
mushroom field at dawn. / I drop one and it’s gone” (55; my emphasis). Now, the
mushroom returns to its natural ecosystem and preferred time of day. And, yet, there is
violence embedded in the word “drop” and its connection to a bomber jet that “drops” a
bomb before “it’s gone.” In the Irish context, “drop” echoes back to the famous last line of
Yeats’s 1928 poem, “Leda and the Swan”: “Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”
(215; emphasis added). Yeats’s Leda is forever caught in Zeus’s beak, since the poetic
frame closes with her mid-air. Thus, Yeats displaces Leda’s post-rape tragedy to hold off
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the wars that he knows will come from this “engendering”: “The broken wall, the burning
room and tower / And Agamemnon dead” (214), and the sonnet, thereby, cannot close.
The Troubles Archive (http://www.troublesarchive.com/) catalogues Carr’s poem
alongside other sectarian poems, a reminder that the localized violence of the Troubles
remains the backdrop to the WWII violence fifty years past. In contrast to Yeats, Carr does
indeed drop her single mushroom, but she does not see it land; it merely disappears into
the early morning. As a result, following Barad’s description of nuclear contamination, the
poem’s “uncanny material topology” (116) embeds three simultaneous present moments
into each other, all of which remain open. First, the speaker-mother prepares a meal in
the presence of her child, the addressee of the poem. Secondly, the voice of the girl on the
radio—an incisive object of mycelial interconnection if there ever was one—recounts her
sister’s death. Lastly, the speaker simulates the actions of an aircraft whose target is
obscured by cloud cover, yet still drops its load “at dawn” (55), like the case of Kokura
which set off the tragedy in Nagasaki. In each instance, the threat of future disturbance
and disaster looms, both nearby (as sectarian violence in Northern Ireland) and distant
(as nuclear aftermath in Japan). Still, Carr’s poem, like Darcy’s, avoids a dystopian vision
by turning toward the future, nurturing, georgic-like, next season’s ‘crop.’
Responding to the Anthropocene: The Resonance of Virgil’s Georgic Aesthetic
Each poem in this paper, by Mahon, Muldoon, Carr, Agee, Regan, and Darcy,
poignantly demonstrates the lasting value of Virgil’s georgic mode. As a didactic poem, the
Georgics honors the nonhuman world for its scalability; from its atomic, to its cosmic
structure, it holds multiple points of view simultaneously. Across wide-spread
interactions, the genre deflects abstraction, in favor of immersion. Further, the georgic
mode predicates that—despite the intrusion of violence upon the agricultural scene—a
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collaborative survival relies on the resilience of both humans and nonhumans. Indeed,
Fairer refers to Virgil’s epic as “Janus-faced,” since “progress” co-exists with the precarity
of potential “anarchy and conflict” (“Georgic” 462). Arising out of precariousness, then,
the georgic poet channels a language of energetic engagement; thereby, the act of
composing a poetic text mirrors the labors of the farmer (and the mushroom, itself).
As this paper has argued, these lyrical mushrooms hailing from Ireland and
Northern Ireland offer readers particularly evocative examples of interrupted georgics
that are both self-annihilating and self-rejuvenating. Herein, we witness an Anthropocene
aesthetics of entanglement characterized not only by rupture, but also by symbiosis and
dependency, where proximity balances distance. Additionally, this project along the
fragile Irish border requires both a spatial sensitivity and a heightened sense of empathy,
tasks well-suited to a poet. For instance, Ailbhe Darcy’s embedded landscape in
“Mushrooms,” “bunkered down” and “snug on the deck” in “this cuckoo winter,” full of
news “dread-heavy with vortex,” is more than a megaphone about environmental
awareness. Rather, it mediates a landscape of blurred boundaries through its employment
of georgic scalability: the human and the nonhuman embed in one another, such that
mushrooms “grow on a person,” making the human into “a vertical farm” (28-9). Thus,
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Darcy’s lyric establishes an interspecies companionship amid precarity, “shifting

attention from crisis to care” (Reynolds 19). As a result, along with the other lyrics
assembled here, it harmonizes with recent scholarship in The New Irish Studies (2020)
that privileges interconnection between sites of solitary cultivation.
Works Cited
Agee, Chris. “Mushrooming.” The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland,
edited by Chris Agee, Salt, 2011, pp. 51-2.
Barad, Karen. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange
Topographies of Spacetimemattering.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of
the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils
Bubandt, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. 103-120.
Bishop, Elizabeth. “In the Waiting Room.” The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1991, pp. 159-61.
Brearton, Fran. “For Father Read Mother: Muldoon’s Antecedents.” Paul Muldoon: Critical
Essays, edited by Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald, Liverpool UP, 2004, pp. 45-61.
Carr, Ruth. “Mushroom.” There is a House. Summer Palace Press, 1995, pp. 54-5.
Darcy, Ailbhe. “Mushrooms.” Insistence. Bloodaxe Books, 2018, pp. 28-9.
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Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open
Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 3-30.
Fairer, David. “Georgic.” The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1960-1800, edited by Jack
Lynch, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 457-72.
---. “The Pastoral-Georgic Tradition.” William Wordsworth in Context, edited by Andrew
Bennett, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 111-18.
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Fallon, Peter. “Translator’s Note.” Georgics, translated by Peter Fallon, Oxford UP, 2006,
pp. xxiv-xxxvi.
Frazier, Adrian. “Canon Fodder: Anthologies of Contemporary Irish Poetry.” Colby
Quarterly, Dec 1992.
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History. Cambridge UP, 2004.
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pp. 150–78.
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the Royal Irish Academy Section C: Archeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics,
Literature, vol. 103, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1-12.
---. “Digging.” Selected Poems: 1966-1987. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990, pp. 3-4.
Horn, Eva and Hannes Bergthaller. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities.
Routledge, 2020.
Longley, Edna. “War Pastorals.” The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish Poetry, edited by
Tim Kendall, Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 461-72.
McDonald, Henry. “Man Shot Dead in South Belfast.” The Guardian. 26 Feb. 2016. Accessed
4 Jan. 2021.
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Mahon, Derek. “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” New Selected Poems. 1975. Faber & Faber,
2016, pp. 34-5.
McKay Wilhelm, Robert. “The Plough—Chariot: Symbol of Order in the Georgics.” The
Classical Journal, vol. 77, no. 3, 1982, pp. 213-30.
Muldoon, Paul. “Gathering Mushrooms.” 1983. Poems 1968-1998. Faber & Faber, 2001, pp.
105-6.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, translated by
Charlotte Mandell, Fordham UP, 2015.
Plath, Sylvia. “Morning Song. The Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes, Harper & Row,
1981, pp. 156-7.
---. “Mushrooms.” The Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes, Harper & Row, 1981, pp.
139-40.
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Irish Poetry, edited by Peter Robinson, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 424-441.
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p. 81.
---. Personal interview. 4 Jan 2021.
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Cambridge UP, 2020, pp. 1-22.
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Shape Our Futures. Penguin, 2020.
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Author: Andermatt, Andrew S. Title: Invoking a ‘Calamity of Peace’: The Private Revolution of Wendell
Berry’s ‘Mad Farmer’
Invoking a ‘Calamity of Peace’:

The Private Revolution of Wendell Berry’s ‘Mad Farmer’
Andrew S. Andermatt
Paul Smith’s College, United States
[email protected]
Abstract
Building on evolving theories and criticism of post-Vietnam War environmentalism, this essay
places Wendell Berry’s agrarian essays and “Mad Farmer Poems” at the cusp of significant ideological
change in twenty-first century ecocritical thought. The semi-fictional mad farmer developed in Berry’s
poetry collection illustrates how the rural farmer serves as a catalyst for revolutionary environmental
change that peacefully marries the private and public uses of wilderness. My analysis of Berry’s poems
demonstrates how the poet’s use of symbolism, metaphor, and peaceful protest positions the farmer as the
most qualified person to lead us away from mainstream and radical environmentalism and toward a
movement indicative of deep-rooted social change.
Keywords: Environmentalism, Wendell Berry, agrarian poetry.
Resumen
Basándose en la evolución de las teorías y la crítica del ecologismo posterior a la guerra de Vietnam,
este ensayo sitúa los ensayos agrarios de Wendell Berry y los "Poemas del granjero loco" en la cúspide de
un cambio ideológico significativo en el pensamiento ecocrítico del siglo XXI. El granjero loco semi-ficticio
desarrollado en la colección de poesía de Berry ilustra cómo el agricultor rural sirve como catalizador para
un cambio medioambiental revolucionario que casa pacíficamente con los usos privados y públicos de la
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naturaleza. Mi análisis de los poemas de Berry demuestra cómo el uso del simbolismo, la metáfora y la
protesta pacífica por parte del poeta posicionan al agricultor como la persona más cualificada para alejarnos
del ecologismo dominante y radical y hacia un movimiento indicativo de un cambio social profundamente
arraigado.
Palabras clave: Ecologismo, Wendell Berry, poesía agraria.
Wendell Berry’s poetic alter-ego, the “mad farmer,” seeks the truth. He considers
his relationship with nature, his reliance on capitalist ideology, his duties to his
community, and lastly, his loyalty to the American government. Many of Berry’s post-
Vietnam essays and poems depict the American farmer’s frustration with urban growth,
the destruction of the environment, and the empty governmental promises of agricultural
support following the turmoil of the late 1960s. Berry’s post-war agrarian essays and
“mad farmer” poems narrate an environmental movement from the perspective of the
rural farmer under a corporate-driven government. 1 The search for “truth” leads Berry,
and his mad farmer persona, to denounce public forms of environmentalism in the context
1 The “Mad Farmer Poems” were originally published in the 1970 poetry collection, Farming: A Handbook.
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of large-scale industrial farms. Berry’s farmer invokes a movement to peacefully reclaim

the land and reassert a community-based farming existence. 2
Berry’s mad farmer poems encourage small-community farmers to return to their
fields and families for spiritual renewal as a peaceful response to the political, economic,
and environmental atrocities created by the Vietnam War. Reminiscent of Virgil’s
Georgics, a poetic celebration of the peacemaking characteristics of agricultural life,
Berry’s poems advocate caring for the land, crops, animals, and most importantly, each
other. 3 In the introduction to her translated text of Virgil’s Georgics, Janet Lembke
describes the poem as “a heartfelt cry for homecoming, for returning landholders and
their families to the fields and pastures they had lost through no fault of their own” (xvi)
during a time of political and civil war caused by Roman expansion throughout the
Mediterranean. The conflict to which Virgil was responding was marked by the “power
struggle between conservative aristocrats and the “nouveau-rich” made wealthy by trade,
agribusiness, and war” (xiv). Similarly, in the wake of the Vietnam War, Berry interprets
the shift from small to corporate farms as a spiritual and physical attack on rural
communities. Many of these larger farms are designed to engage in faster, safer,
environmentally friendly agricultural practices, but economically and spiritually, they
destroy small farms. The selfish, prideful, greedy behaviors that Berry attributes to fueling
the war are also the attitudes that destroy small rural communities once dependent on
family farms; he labels these behaviors “a deadly illness of mankind” (The Long-Legged
House 66) 4. The issues perpetuating the Vietnam War and post-war environmental
thought, suggests Berry, are based on an inability to address how we treat each other and
the world. Despite promises to practice non-violence against each other and the
environment, communities continue to foster violence by endorsing a want rather than a
need culture.
Berry’s argument is not new, and readers may ask why we should dredge up the
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complaints of Berry’s farmer decades after their publication. The answer is glaring. “The
machine economy has set afire / the household of the human soul, / and all the creatures
are burning within it,” he asserts in his poem “Some Further Words” (The Mad Farmer
Poems 33). Berry’s essays and mad-farmer poems build on the Vietnam war-time
mentality by addressing the machine and technology-driven environmental movements
of the post-Carson era 5. The same movement that championed the protection of America’s
communities and wilderness by creating an environment that is safe from chemical
hazards and long-term global threats is equally responsible for the erasure of the small-
town farmer from the American landscape. Berry’s environmentalism, as evidenced by
2 Bron Taylor’s forward to Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, asserts that, “it is only through
“experiments with truth” (to borrow a phrase from Gandhi’s autobiography) during concrete political
struggles that we have a chance to discover or recover viable solutions” (5).
3 Virgil’s Georgics was his second major work, after The Eclogues and before The Aeneid, published between
37 and 30 B. C.
4 Berry makes this assertion in “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” a speech presented to the
Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft at the University of Kentucky in 1968. The speech is included
in Berry’s The Long-Legged House.
5 Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking 1962 work, Silent Spring, is credited as the catalyst for the modern
environmental movement discussed at length in this essay.
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his ‘mad farmer,’ begins privately, on his own farm, in his own community, for his and his
neighbor’s own good. The “mad farmer” persona is created to embody the personal
responsibility of nurturing an intimate relationship with the earth and those we call our
neighbors. The term “mad” may be used in two ways: It may refer to the anger that the
farmer feels toward the disappearance of small farms, but it could also be used as his
perceived mental state for wanting to distance himself from the rewards that capitalism
promises. The poems underscore Berry’s theories discussed in his many essays and allow
readers to experience firsthand the American farmer’s anguish. The loss of small family
farms is more than just an economic problem: it is a loss of identity, culture, and family.
“The first casualties of the exploitive revolution are character and community,” he argues
(The Unsettling of America 11). The farmer is still capable of adopting a private
environmentalism, but only if he divorces himself from the commercialization of
agriculture.
The farmer’s suitability to model future environmental movements and reestablish
the small, rural farm requires attention to two discussions I present in this essay. First, I
examine how recent scholarship on the post-Vietnam era environmental movement, in
the context of small farming communities presented in Berry’s essays, is counterintuitive
to fostering healthy farming communities. 6 Second, I demonstrate how Berry’s “mad
farmer” and post -Vietnam industrial growth and misguided environmentalism provide
significant political struggles in response to the wilderness degradation that early
movements failed to prevent. By focusing on Berry’s “mad farmer” poems and his portrait
of the farmer as a peacemaker and nurturer, intimately tied to the land, I argue that the
farmer reveals to the reader the urgency needed to escalate a deep, social ideological
change that formal movements neglect. 7
Post-Vietnam Mainstream and Radical Environmentalism
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In the context of Berry’s agrarian essays and poetry, post-Vietnam War
environmentalism, characterized by economic, technological, and industrial growth for
the sake of human comfort, drives / has driven / is driving? small farming communities
to extinction. 8 This growth strips the farmer of his character and identity, provokes
violent ideology against the farmer, and leads to an increase in abandoned farms. Growing
farming commercialization leads families to live less on their own products than in
prewar times. Vegetable crops and meat are primarily produced for resale outside the
community, which is forcing the farmers to purchase food for their families from larger,
more industrious suppliers. Farming since the 1960s relies on agricultural technology to
6 Morris Allen Grubbs’s edited collection of interviews, Conversations with Wendell Berry, provides excellent
context for many of Berry’s essays and poems.
7 This line of thought is synonymous with what Mark Somma calls “Revolutionary Environmentalism,”
which I will discuss at length later in the essay.

8 The essays in Best and Nocella’s Igniting an Environmental Revolution refer to this movement as
“mainstream environmentalism.”
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make the farmer’s work more efficient for large-scale production. 9 However, the
connection between modernization of agricultural techniques and, as Berry asserts, “the
disintegration of the culture and the communities of farming” has not been adequately
recognized. Berry explains in “The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture” that reliance
on quantity over quality is a central issue facing small farm communities (The Unsettling
of America 45). 10 To increase quantity, he argues, many technological advancements in
machinery replace the work of American farmers, thus all their discipline and know-how
is sacrificed. This statement underlines a concern expressed in several essays and poems
addressed later in this essay. “What is the effect on quantity of persuading a producer to
produce an inferior product? What, in other words, is the relation of pride and
craftsmanship to abundance?” (46). Berry asks these fundamental questions to
underscore the loss of the unique skills that build the character of the American farmer.
For a comprehensive historical analysis of post-Vietnam environmentalism, I turn
to Hal Rothman’s book The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States
Since 1945. Rothman points to the late 1960s as a crucial time in the development of
United States environmentalism. American culture embraced a utopian vision by the late
1960s (83). Concerns for the physical environment and the effects of human activities on
the landscape became part of everyday environmental discourse. Instead of efficiency that
dominated the scientific conservation at the turn of the century, Rothman asserts that
Americans developed a new ethic that emphasized the concerns of an affluent, optimistic
society that envisioned no limits to its possibilities (84). Moreover, Rothman asserts that
Americans became obsessed with individualism, individual rights and personal
entitlement, rather than focusing on the collective rights and personal obligations that the
nation’s founders envisioned (85). Due to this ideology, the notion of “community” and
healthy environments got lost.
The mainstream environmental movement born out of the 1960s and 1970s
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political conflict focuses on rectifying the destruction of nature for purely anthropocentric
uses which fuels a movement of violence and a revenge mentality that leads us even
further away from Berry’s ideals. Mainstream environmentalism, according to Mark
Somma, is described as “a reform oriented, technocratic outlook that seeks
accommodation with the existing corporate economic and interest-group political
system” (37). 11 Activists disgruntled with mainstream environmentalism turn to radical
forms of action to educate the public about the atrocities of environmental degradation.
Perhaps the most well-known of these groups is Earth First!, established in 1980 by Dave
Forman. In “A Spark that Ignited a Flame: The Evolution of the Earth Liberation Front”
Noel Molland discusses the popularity of Earth First! in the United States and its influence
throughout Europe. While the movement is characterized and popularized by protests,
9 Paul Conkin’s A Revolution Down on the Farm traces the history of American agriculture from the times of
the early English settlers through the Twenty-first century. His book examines the changes to small farm
communities, federal policies impacting the farmer, and technological advances in agricultural techniques.
10 In the same essay, Berry compares communist countries forcing populations out of their villages to
politicians in Washington forcing small farmers out of business (45).

11 Somma compares “mainstream environmentalism” to philosopher Arne Naess’s “shallow ecology.” Some
scholarship refers to this movement as “traditional environmentalism.”
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civil disobedience, and ecotage (Molland 47), its radical offshoot, the Earth Liberation
Front (ELF) is perhaps even more well known for violence. Meant to target exploiters of
nature, the ELF asserts that its actions are to destroy the properties of those who profit
from exploiting the environment. The ELF members argue that the law will support those
individuals and industries that are directly harming nature. Paul Joosse in
“Antiglobalization and Radical Environmentalism: An Exchange on Ethical Grounds”
presents revealing data about this behavior. He argues that since 1997, “[the ELF] has
committed over 600 acts of sabotage and arson in North America, causing over $100
million in damages to biomedical research centres, logging companies, ski resorts, and
SUV dealerships” (34). The problem here is that the radical protests are targeting those in
power to get revenge for a perceived wrong. Matthew Hall, in “Beyond the Human:
Extending Ecological Anarchism” provides an accurate assessment when he asserts that
“anarchist thinkers recognise that ‘power is everywhere’, but they focus their criticisms
on political and social power which uses force and compulsion to execute actions against
the will of others” (376). The problem with mainstream and radical environmental
movements is that they are contradictions, as Berry predicts and as we have seen.
Our actions toward achieving post-war community and environmental harmony
are steeped in irony. Berry points out that we preserve peace by waging war, advance
freedom by supporting dictatorships, or “win the hearts and minds of the people by
poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration
camps” (Long-Legged House 68). These contradictions are at the heart of some of the more
recent criticisms of radical actions. 12 Property destruction detracts from the seriousness
of protests, encourages police brutality, promotes militarization of protest management,
and leads environmental activists to question the effectiveness of protests (Joosse 43).
The ELF’s (and similar group’s) attempt to disable profit motive through violent attacks
does more harm than good to the environment. Joosse argues that property destruction
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and protests undermine the aims of the movement and do little “to encourage practical,
local, and sustained action in the service of global justice” (34-5), and his argument is
precisely the reason that Berry calls to make our actions more private than public.
In his 1970 essay, “Think Little,” Berry addresses the natural rise and fall of
political movements in America. 13 He is particularly concerned with the possibility of the
environmental movement becoming a “[. . .] public cause, served by organizations that will
self-righteously criticize and condemn other organizations, inflated for a while by a lot of
public talk in the media, only to be replaced in its turn by another fashionable crisis” (The
Art of the Commonplace 81-82). 14 The main issue here is that people do not engage in
12 Hall, for example, argues that anarchism is “a promising political philosophy for undermining the human
hierarchy and domination of the natural world and exploring the exclusion and subjugation of the non-
human” (375). He further argues that we need to establish a non-hierarchical relationship with non-
humans. Milstein et al, in “Make Love, Not War?” argue that radical movements become stronger and more
nuanced as time progresses, but that the violence associated by direct action appeals to media outlets can
be framed in more effective and inclusive ways.
13 Berry specifically points to the Civil Rights and Peace Movements.
14 Joosse argues that continually addressing environmental problems with technological solutions clouds
our vision of what the true environmental issues are, namely “global capitalism’s inherent pursuit of
unfettered economic growth” (33-4).
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environmentalism as a private cause; the messages at the heart of protests, peaceful or

otherwise, are lost in the public sphere. The media attention is centered on actions rather
than message. Berry asks that we regard the environmental movement as an extension of
the Civil Rights and Peace movements and argues that the same mentality in exploiting
the environment exists in the fostering of racism and militarism. The problems remain
public and institutionalized with the blame being placed on others (government). Rather,
we should assume these issues on a much more private, personal level and without
violence. There may be some immediate benefits to the ELF’s challenge of corporate
operations, but their actions are still very different from the inclusive, continual, local,
political involvement that is lacking in the anti-globalization movement (Joosse 44).
Measures taken by mainstream and radical environmentalists, we may conclude,
are more symbolic than impactful, and they neglect the real issue facing our communities.
William Major underscores one of the more significant points made by Berry when he
asserts that, “marriage of violence and American identity is perhaps best exemplified less
by the brutality of our streets—which, in essence, is a political problem—than it is by the
machinations of our economic life and their effects on the land” (27). These issues
continue to plague our communities in the post-Vietnam era because they are rooted in
the consumerism that increasingly takes over the natural and social world (Best and
Nocella 8). Best and Nocella point to two specific issues that are responsible for the war
on the environment: overpopulation and mass production. A careful read through
Roderick Nash’s classic text Wilderness and the American Mind underscores the
conclusion that western culture, from the pioneer era, through nineteenth-century
romanticism, and into the preservationist and conservationist twenty-first century has
pushed the limits of what it means to civilize the wilderness. 15
The loss of nature and small-town farming communities to twentieth century
consumerism may be recovered by receding from the public environmental battle and
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practicing a more personal approach. This movement begins in our own home
communities on family farms. Berry’s argument that a healthy culture is “a communal
order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration” begins to
address this issue (The Unsettling of America 47). He continues that a healthy farm culture
is based on familiarity with the land thus promoting an intelligence that “no amount of
technology can satisfactorily replace” (47). The key issue here is, as Berry states, that if
we allow generations to pass without invoking the possibilities of farm communities, all
will be lost. “And then we will not only invoke calamity—we will deserve it” (47).
Now, over two decades into the new millennium, neither mainstream nor radical
environmentalism truly rectify damage to the environment. Rather, we must consider
Mark Somma’s call for “revolutionary environmentalism.” In “Revolutionary
Environmentalism: An Introduction,” Somma argues that mainstream and radical
15 Ralph Pite’s “How Green were the Romantics?” provides a necessary evaluation for how we interpret
ecological problems. He asserts that ecological science is relatively new and that how we define and
perceive environmental issues is a matter of personal interpretation. Turning to poets and essayists such
as William Wordsworth, Percy B. Shelley, and Aldo Leopold, Pite argues, helps us understand how we should
react to the scientific data with which we are presented.
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environmentalism do very little to establish a “qualitatively new social system” (38).

These acts of environmentalism embrace actions and behaviors over significant changes
in ideology. Somma asserts that we need to move to an entirely new, positive social society
which does not yet exist. Revolutionary environmentalism, according to Somma,
promotes the need for deep ecological change integrated into the practical social and
economic life of ordinary citizens. The three main components that define this movement
are having a spiritual awakening, promoting ecological education and fundamental
political and economic change. At first glance, Somma’s proposition for a revolutionary
environmentalism seems unattainable. As Bron Taylor aptly states in his forward to
Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, “the term "revolutionary" is concerned
primarily with making lasting, systemic change” (4). He argues that many supporters of
revolutionary environmentalism believe that their ideologies cannot be realized without
abolishing the current forms of environmentalism that exist.
It is not that late-twentieth century environmentalism is not necessary and well-
intentioned. Best and Nocella emphasize that environmentalism is a necessary movement
“toward healing the pathologies of a destructive and domineering society” (9). However,
post-Vietnam movements have done more to temporarily rectify the destruction of the
environment for instrumental purposes rather than prevent damage to the environment
to preserve its intrinsic qualities. While the movement protects nature, it does so in
concert with corporate, economic, and political motivation. The decisions made for
environmental protection depend on the individual leadership and special interest
groups. Therefore, the movement embraces an anthropocentric view of nature promoted
by white, privileged males. 16
The Farmer is Not without Blame
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The idea of sharing in land ownership and being bound to it by immediate
economic interest (survival from the food we produce), investing love and work, family
loyalty, and memory and tradition is promising. “It has the power to turn each person
away from the big-time promising and planning of government, to confront in himself, in
the immediacy of his own circumstances and whereabouts, the question of what methods
and ways are best” (Berry, The Unsettling of America 16). It proposes an economy of
necessity requiring the adoption of a private environmentalism on our own land.
Before praising Berry’s farmer as a natural “revolutionary” leader, it is important
to note that Berry does not believe that the farmer is innocent of violent acts. We need to
consider Firas A. Nsaif Al Jumaili’s argument in his essay, “Wendell Berry: Mediating
Between Culture and Nature,” that there is a mixed message associated with the farmer.
In one respect, the farmer must destroy nature, by removing forests and destroying
wildlife to provide room to grow crops. However, Al Jumaili points out Berry’s argument
16The “Wilderness Act of 1964” places specific definitions on how “wilderness” is defined and enforces
protection based on human perceived value of wild areas. These criteria consist of land size, whether
human-made structures or alterations are deemed necessary, or if resources in each area are essential to
human use.
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that wilderness and civilization can co-exist with “enlightened farmers” who find space
for the wilderness on their farms (120).
The American farmer, however, is not born “enlightened.” Berry would likely not
agree that abolishing current environmental thought is necessary for sustained,
systematic change. Rather, he argues that we need to look at history to reshape our ideals.
The first half of Berry’s essay, “The Unsettling of America” presents the similarities
between the foreign and domestic colonialism responsible for the destruction of
productive farms and forests. “Now, as then, we see the abstract values of an industrial
economy preying upon a native productivity of land and people” (9). Berry’s essay
provides a historical overview of white America and how it has been both a catalyst for
and victim of exploitation. He first asserts that the historical discussion documents how
exploitation is deeply rooted in our past. Europeans exploited the land by civilizing it and
running natives off the land. However, white settlers, too, have always been victims of
exploitation and invasion from generation to generation. Modern industrialization
continues to buy out individuals for land. The exploitation is as much a modern problem
as a historical one. “[. . .] These conquerors have fragmented and demolished traditional
communities, the beginnings of domestic cultures,” Berry argues, and these conquerors
have argued that what they destroyed was outdated, provincial, and contemptible.
Victims, especially those who were also white, often believed them. He asserts, “[. . .] the
class of independent small farmers who fought the war of independence has been
exploited by, and recruited into, the industrial society until by now it is almost extinct”
(6).
Semblances of the period of industrial growth are highlighted further when Berry
mentions white Europeans trading items such as knives, tools, cloth, weapons, ornaments,
novelties, and alcohol. These materials changed the Indian way of life because they made
life easier. Handicrafts became obsolete. Modes of hunting changed. “The Indians acquired
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commercial values and developed business cults. They became more mobile [. . . ]” (7-8).
While the Indians experienced movements in population, their “place was based upon old
usage and association, upon inherited memory, tradition, veneration” (6). Berry refers to
the exploitation of the Indians as a parable. He argues that it was not a loss in battle that
made them “redskin,” but rather accepting dependence on traders “that made necessities
of industrial goods” (8). A farmer’s existence under a post-war corporate
environmentalism is one that will not thrive. Not only does environmentalism vis a vis
corporate and industrial growth threaten the farmer’s economic well-being, but it also
threatens his own physical existence.
Additionally, the historical overview illustrates how revolutionary the idea of
exploitation is over time, and it shows how our relationship to the land is integral to our
history. The founding of America (and its conquest) rarely occurred on purpose as it was
the result of our ancestors’ rush to clear the way to get to some other fertile land or area
where gold was promised. Some North American settlers, however, saw promise in the
land and opted to establish a “home.” They created agricultural settlements rather than
continue the quest for gold. Other settlers, however, failed to see the continent as a
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“home,” and thus failed to understand that the wild, howling wilderness of North America
was “home” to native Americans.
The Mad Farmer as Political Pacifist
Berry’s “mad farmer” poems advance the discourse on revolutionary

environmentalism because they illustrate how the rural farmer serves as a catalyst for
deep-rooted change by peacefully engaging in private measures that evoke peace,
community, and the health of the land. In “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” the
persona says, “I am done with apologies,” and he goes on to assert that if he prefers to do
the opposite of what is expected then so be it. The rest of the poem provides examples of
his “contrariness,” defined as deliberate unruliness and disobedience. He plants by the
stars [not the experts] and puts faith in God that he would have a crop. He laughs at
funerals and cringes at weddings, gives money when enough has been collected, and only
joins in activity when it was on his own accord. These actions demonstrate rebellion, but
in a non-violent yet meaningful (to the farmer) way.
The first overtly political blow comes when the persona says, “Well, then, ‘they
said’ / go and organize the International Brotherhood / of Contraries” (The Mad Farmer
Poems 8). At the request, the persona asks, “Did you finish killing / everybody who was
against peace?” While a discussion of the poem’s commentary on the war is outside the
scope of this analysis, it is important to note that “The violence of the domestic economy,
seen here in scarred lands, acidic streams, polluted wells, and the loss of natural and
human habitat is strategically juxtaposed with Vietnam to emphasize their commonality
under governmental and corporate complicity” (Major 34). The persona concludes the
poem by offering his overall lesson: going against “men,” the representation of established
environmentalism discussed earlier in this essay, has given him a sense of “deep
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harmony” and truth. Berry’s farmer does not ignore the political ramifications that
previous movements instill, nor does he advance his cause by advocating the violence that
these political actions provoke. Berry, a pacifist, combats a violent capitalist society by
turning to his own domestic reality: his own farm. In his own private space, the farmer
does as he pleases, answering only to nature and the crops he has cultivated. 17
For a more serious political commentary, I turn to “The Mad Farmer, Flying the
Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union.” The poem denotes the farmer’s attempt
to remedy mainstream environmentalism. Written from a third-person perspective, the
poem overviews the mad farmer’s desire to distance himself from a commercialized
society. The opening stanza identifies all the promises from which the farmer is walking
away: power and money, power and secrecy, government and science, government and
art, science and money, ambition and ignorance, genius and war, and outer space and
17 The essay “Conservation and the Local Economy” in The Art of the Commonplace provides an excellent
overview of how environmental conditions shape Berry’s call for increased awareness and support of small,
community-based agriculture. Berry also provides personal accounts of hardships facing the rural farmer
in his home of Port Royal, Kentucky.
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inner vacuity (The Mad Farmer Poems 27). To change his thinking, he must remove
himself from these economic-driven vices.
It is important to first examine the act of “secession” as it is being used in this
poem. Berry chooses a politically charged act, often one that is accompanied by violence
or military aggression, to place his persona in a war. His secession, however, is not
wrought in violence; it is peaceful, and the metaphor is being used to demonstrate the
drastic measure the farmer is willing to employ to preserve his farming community.
After the “secession” from the ills of war and violence, the farmer “returns to the small
country he calls home” (27). This country is his farm, and the second stanza illustrates
the close loyalty and connections that the farmer has with his land and his neighbors
[sharing potluck dinners with them]. These homes that the farmer describes present a
close bond, a “togetherness” that the “Union” ironically fails to provide. In a key passage
the persona states:
Come all ye conservatives and liberals
who want to conserve the good things and be free,
come away from the merchants of big answers,
whose hands are metalled with power;
from the union of anywhere and everywhere
by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
from the union of work and debt, work and despair;
from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.
From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
Secede into care for one another
and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth. (28)
This stanza is not politically divisive despite the threat of secession; the farmer calls for
both conservatives and liberals to come together. The peaceful secession is the act of
turning away from the corporations, or “merchants of big answers.” Further, Berry places
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the blame of war on consumerism when he says that the merchants’ hands are “metalled
with power,” as if they are armed and easily overpower consumers. The power to
purchase goods cheap and resell them at a higher price demonstrates Berry’s concern
with exploitation, “wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.” Finally, the persona re-
asserts his peaceful protest by asking his fellow community members to join him in
separating from a country of greed and profit and return to a country (his community)
that cares for one another.
Berry’s persona furthers this movement in the second stanza when he asks people
to embrace the economy of the body, daily work, and replenishment at mealtime and at
night (freedom through severing political ties). The persona then invites the reader to join
in the farmer’s world:
Come into the dance of the community, joined
in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal
love of women and men for one another
and of neighbors and friends for one another. (28)
Berry’s poem illustrates both the need for and the capability of communities to unite.
However, a figurative interpretation yields another outlook. For the community to unite,
Berry’s farmer has had to secede from the “union,” suggesting a brazen political move that
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was made considering previous efforts not being successful. The political metaphor is
strong; the union is the larger, corporate world that governs all economies and
communities. For the farmer and his neighbors to get out from under the hold of corporate
America, they must remove themselves and create their own community [or union] of
farmers. While co-existence is certainly a theme derived from this poem, the blatant
separation the farmer experiences from the corporate world is clear.
Politicians and bureaucrats base success on the economic prosperity of industrial
interests and not on the success or failure of small local economies. David Robinson, in
“Wilderness and the Agrarian Principle: Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and the Ethical
Definition of the ‘Wild’” contends that wild and human interactions in the late twentieth
century are often associated with antisocial acts that show “disregard for and domination
of others that characterizes the structure of our social relationships, and in extremes, the
violence, perpetrated by both individuals and nation-states, which haunts our ordered
and regulated lives (16). The farmer’s commentary that we receive in “Prayers and
Sayings of the Mad Farmer” and “The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer” are typical. A wish
for a good crop, a healthy environment, and a moral existence are all that he wants. In
these poems we find Berry and his persona as farmer and theorist, both of whom exhibit
a significant degree of pacifism that fosters their agrarian commitments (Major 29).
Berry’s essay “Think Little” points to the American farmer’s hard work with fewer
economic returns. “As a class,” Berry argues, “farmers are one of the despised minorities.
So far as I can see, farming is considered marginal or incidental to the economy of the
country, and farmers, when they are thought of at all, are thought of as hicks and yokels
whose lives do not fit into the modern scene” (The Art of the Commonplace 85). 18 As
generations pass, the farmer’s knowledge and intimate connection with the land is lost.
Corporations and machines are not bound to the land like the farmer—big farms think in
terms of volume and efficiency as opposed to care for the crops and the land. Berry argues
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that to repair the damage, we need to go further than public protests and political action.
“We are going to have to rebuild the substance and the integrity of private life in this
country” (Berry, The Art of the Commonplace 86). William Major’s “Other Kinds of
Violence: Wendell Berry, Industrialism, and Agrarian Pacifism” asserts that once the
individual is carrying out the foundations of true change, conscience, morality, and local
knowledge, he “is no longer tethered to anything fundamental” (33). Being part of the
economic barrier that is the “union,” only serves to distract the farmer from finding true
change.
The Mad Farmer as Nurturer
The second part of Berry’s essay “The Unsettling of America” distinguishes

between the characteristics of the exploiter and the nurturer. In short, the exploiter is
concerned with efficiency and profit, whereas the nurturer is concerned with health and
18In “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” Berry argues that rural communities are often regarded as
backward, unprogressive, unmodern and in need of new advancement and technology (The Art of the
Commonplace 165).
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long-term dependability. Berry identifies the farmer as the nurturer. In other words, the
exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, “hard facts” while the nurturer thinks in
terms of character, condition, quality, and kind.
The nurturing farmer presented in Berry’s poems is divine and mythical. He
introduces the farmer as a nurturer, who crosses the boundaries of sexual roles, to seed,
plant, nurse, and repeat. He says, “[. . .] the farmer crosses back and forth from one zone
of spousehood to another, first as planter and then as gatherer” (The Unsettling of America
10). The farmer has a divine hold over nature. “The Man Born to Farming,” the first poem
in Berry’s collection, offers a third-person observation of a farmer’s supernatural
relationship with the land. The persona tells us that to the farmer the “soil is a divine
drug,” and he is the one who “enters into death / yearly, and comes back rejoicing” (3).
The death referenced here is the harvest: once the vegetation dies off the farmer reaps
the rewards. There is a life-cycle metaphor that permeates the poem, however. From
death, as previously referenced, comes life when his hands reach “into the ground and
sprout.” Furthermore, he sees the sun set in the “dung heap,” a reference to early planting
when the fields have been fertilized and rise again “in the corn” when the crops are
completed (3).
The farmer as a mythical character has the power to influence nature without the
help of machines. The persona asks, “What miraculous seed has he swallowed / that the
unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth / like a vine clinging in the sunlight,
and like water / descending in the dark?” (The Mad Farmer Poems 3). Symbolically, the
farmer has the power and the understanding of the land that is highly unique. It is not a
far-reaching idea to call upon the farmer to lead the march into the fundamental changes
that revolutionary environmentalism demands. “Berry’s discursive attack on
modernity— faith-based or no—helps us to re-think the private/public dichotomy he so
readily summons as essential to environmental and cultural renewal” (Major 30). The
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farmer, in this instance, is not influenced by modern advances in agriculture. He relies on
the relationship with his own private farm to understand his relationship with nature.
Despite the effects of misguided environmental protection of the twentieth
century, the “mythical” farmer has the power to save the environment with his own hands.
Robinson makes an interesting argument when he says that the farm is “in many ways an
entity based on order and control, dedicated to the use of the land for ends decided by the
farmer, usually economic ends. The farm, that is, can be seen as the first step in the denial
of the wild” (17). However, Berry’s farmer represents an individual descending directly
from the wild. Berry illustrates that the farmer, despite order and control and potential
profits, is the man who is most in tune with the wild. In “The Mad Farmer Revolution,” the
first poem in the collection to provide a call to action, Berry again presents a third person
observation that paints the farmer as a mythical creature, “dancing at night in the oak
shades / with goddesses” (The Mad Farmer Poems 5). His power has made a bountiful
crop of corn, pumpkins, plums, peaches, and flowers.
But what really makes the farmer a divine nurturer? In “People, Land, and
Community” Berry suggests that to work at a farm and make it successful, it takes time
and community. Berry states that “human continuity is virtually synonymous with good
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farming, and good farming obviously must outlast the life of any good farmer” (The Art of
the Commonplace 189). For good farming to last it must occur in a farming community, a
neighborhood where people know each other and place proper value on good farming. He
asserts that, “A healthy culture holds preserving knowledge in place for a long time. That
is, the essential wisdom accumulates in the community much as fertility builds in the soil”
(189). 19 We become victim to industrial farming the minute we purchase machinery.
Farm and farmer both become resources. “It is running out for the farm built on the
industrial pattern; the industrial farm burns fertility as it burns fuel. For the farm built
into the pattern of living things, as an analogue of forest or prairie, time is a bringer of
gifts” (192).
In “Some Further Words,” Berry’s persona crafts a succinct philosophy statement
for the farmer:
The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air. (33)
This passage allows readers to see the balance and give-and-take relationship that the
farmer fosters with the land. The land is his to nurture and cultivate, but it is not truly his
in the sense of ownership. He may own the farm but is not entitled to the ownership of
the land, much like a singer cannot own the air where her song is carried. William Major’s
essay sheds light on why we should look to Berry’s writings to understand the division
between these public and private environmental spheres. Major’s essay asserts that
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pacifism and environmentalism work with one another. Berry’s environmentalism
captures the pacifism he practices individually, which, as an agrarian environmentalism,
speaks directly against the violence associated with capitalistic ideology. As Major argues,
Berry presents scenarios that suggest a disconnect between the peaceable agrarian
domestic life and the violent public sphere. “Berry’s writings target both mainstream
environmentalism and industrial militarism, a critique that is often lacking in most
“shallow” environmental discourse” (29). Berry’s writing provides an understanding for
how purpose and meaning are shaped by the ethical values developed out of relationships
fostered between individuals, families, and the landscape (Robinson 17). However, these
ideas are in stark contrast to the foundations of mainstream environmentalism.
As Somma asserts, the revolutionary environmental movement is most effective
when every day citizens are called upon for action rather than law makers and
entrepreneurs who are removed from nature. Berry’s poems are from the perspective of
Berry discusses how the Old Order Amish’s longevity in farming is based on their reliance on horses and
19
manual labor as opposed to machine-operated equipment. These farmers have run out millions of
mechanized farmers (190).
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the very individual that Somma describes. This mad farmer is not the privileged individual
who embraces the mainstream. Rather, he is the working individual most in tune with the
earth. Al Jumaili points out that Berry’s “relationship with the earth, woods, lakes,
mountains and streams is dominated by a developed deep understanding and experience
rather than being dominated by the requirements of science, technology, and profit”
(121). His experience of intimately cultivating the land as a farmer allows him a
perspective rarely seen by non-farmers. As Major reminds us, Berry believes that practice
and security are meaningless when not immersed in land stewardship (29). However,
revisiting poems such as those that celebrate the American farmer could lend a new
interpretation of how we can begin moving toward this way of viewing our relationship
with the land and society.
Conclusion
Berry argues that our lack of imagination to envision our future world is a “failure
to perceive a relation between our ideals and our lives” (Long-Legged House 67). To live
fully and free it is important to embrace American ideals, but these ideals cannot be
achieved through violence. Our involvement in violence and war demonstrates that we
have lost our faith in our ideals and that we know we have not lived up to them. “We do
these things because we have forsaken our principles and abandoned ourselves in the
inertia of power” (68). We seek to uphold the “truth” with lies and answer dissent with
force and intimidation. Berry asserts that “this involves us in a sort of official madness, in
which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we
commit one absurdity after another” (68). The ultimate madness, Berry contends, is that
to destroy our enemies we are willing to build and keep weapons that will destroy
ourselves and the world. He contends, “The revolution that interests me and that I believe
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in is not the revolution by which men change governments, but that by which they change
themselves” (74).
Berry’s 1988 essay, “Economy and Pleasure” presents the most glaring dichotomy
that exists in modern agriculture: On the one hand industrial farming relies on constant
change and technology and on the other hand the small, community farm thrives off
stability and balance. Berry makes clear how those who hold small farming communities
dear to their heart should respond to cultural movements that threaten that way of life.
However, no essay or poem on its own is going to change those actions. Rather, Berry’s
works create an action plan that embrace the pacifist ideals of a revolutionary
environmentalism
To carry out this peaceful “revolution,” Berry’s farmer offers important guidelines.
In “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” the persona issues a warning: If you
embrace quick profit, all things ready-made, instant gratification and so forth, your mind
will be owned by the government. The government will tell you what to buy and when
and your future will be determined by these individuals. To resist this influence, the
farmer asks readers to do something that does not automatically translate to profit. He
asks readers to love the Lord, love someone who does not deserve it, denounce the
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government and so forthBasically, do anything that cannot be bought or sold. Embrace

nature by calling a forest your crop (knowing you will never harvest it) and call the leaves
that fall from the tree and rot your harvest. The persona asks his readers to “Put your faith
in the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years” (The
Mad Farmer Poems 20). As soon as the government figures out the moves you are making,
you need to throw them off the trail—the way a fox does when he makes unnecessary
tracks to lure prey in a different direction.
Does the American farmer successfully carry the flag for a twenty-first century
revolution for the protection of small farms? That remains to be seen. What we can
conclude, however, is that Berry makes compelling arguments for why we should follow
the “mad farmer” into peaceful battle. In “Some Further Words” the persona states, “My
purpose is a language that can make us whole, though mortal, ignorant, and small” (32).
It is tempting to view this poem as a commentary or preface directly from Berry, but its
position in the text (late among the poems) suggests that the poem serves as an aside from
the mad farmer himself. Al Jumaili concludes that Berry’s “intense interest in the natural
world was not inward toward transcendental awareness but outward toward
membership, family, and human cohesion” (125). Al Jumaili’s point is further
substantiated by Major who argues that Berry’s theories are “connected foremost in the
private domestic world where the work of peace and stewardship has its moral center.
Even if peace doesn’t come, at least the individual lives with the certitude of a clear
conscience, free of the public stain that too easily soils the person of character” (32).
Works Cited
Vol 12, No 2
Al Jumaili, Firas A. Nsaif. “Wendell Berry: Mediating Between Culture and Nature.” Journal
of Nusantara Studies, vol. 2, no.2, 2017, pp. 118-126.
Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace : The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, edited
by Norman Wirzba, Counterpoint, 2002.
---. The Long-Legged House. 1965. Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004.
---. The Mad Farmer Poems. 2008. Counterpoint, 2013.
---. The Unsettling of America. 1977. Counterpoint, 2015.
Best, Steven and Anthony J. Nocella, II. “Introduction: A Fire in the Belly of the Beast: The
Emergence of Revolutionary Environmentalism.” Igniting a Revolution: Voices in
Defense of the Earth, edited by Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella, II, AK Press, 2006,
pp. 8-29.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. 1962. Mariner Books, 2002.
Conkin, Paul. A Revolution Down on the Farm. UP of Kentucky, 2008.
Grubbs, Morris Allen, editor. Conversations With Wendell Berry. University Press of
Mississippi, 2007.
Hall, Matthew. “Beyond the Human: Extending Ecological Anarchism.” Environmental
Politics, vol. 20, no. 3, 2011, pp. 374-390.
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Joose, Paul. “Antiglobalization and Radical Environmentalism: An Exchange on Ethical

Grounds.” Ethics in Progress, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 33-51.
Lembke, Janet, translator. Virgil’s Georgics. Yale University Press, 2005.
Major, William. “Other Kinds of Violence: Wendell Berry, Industrialism, and Agrarian
Pacifism.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 25-41.
Milstein, Tema, et al. “Make Love, Not War?: Radical Environmental Activism’s
Reconfigurative Potential and Pitfalls.” EPE: Nature and Space, vol. 4, no. 2, 2021, pp.
296-316.
Molland, Noel. “A Spark that Ignited a Flame: The Evolution of the Earth Liberation Front.”
Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, edited by Steven Best and Anthony
J. Nocella, II, AK Press, 2006, pp. 47-58.
Nash, Roderick Frasier. Wilderness and the American Mind. 5th ed., Yale University Press,
2014.
Pite, Ralph. “How Green Were the Romantics.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 35, no. 3, 1996,
pp. 357-373.
Robinson, David M. “Wilderness and the Agrarian Principle: Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry,
and the Ethical Definition of the ‘Wild’.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the
Environment, vol. 6, no. 1, 1999, pp. 15-27.
Rothman, Hal K. The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in The United States Since
1945. Harcourt Brace, 1998.
Somma, Mark. “Revolutionary Environmentalism: An Introduction.” Igniting a Revolution:
Voices in Defense of the Earth, edited by Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella, II, AK
Press, 2006, pp. 37-46.
Taylor, Bron. “Forward: Experimenting with Truth.” Igniting a Revolution: Voices in
Defense of the Earth, edited by Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella, II, AK Press, 2006,
pp. 1-7.
Vol 12, No 2
Wilderness Act of 1964.
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Author: Dauphin, Caroline Title: From Suzanne Verdier to Anna Barbauld: An Ecofeminist Revolution of the
Georgics?
From Suzanne Verdier to Anna Barbauld:

An Ecofeminist Revolution of the Georgics?
Caroline Dauphin
Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
[email protected]
Abstract
This article explores how the tradition of georgic writing in the early 19th century is reinvented
through ecofeminist standpoints in France and in England. It focuses on the works of two poets: Suzanne
Verdier’s Géorgiques du Midi (Georgics of Southern France, 1799-1812) and Anna Barbauld’s English poem
“The Caterpillar” (1815). Through a comparative analysis, this article will question the connections between
French and English traditions of the georgic and observe how female voices emerge at the dawn of
Romanticism, with specific ecopolitical claims and poetic representations. Indeed, Verdier dedicates the
first canto of her French georgics, “The Silkworm”, to sericulture, an exclusively female practice, which is
initially denounced as a form of repressive biopolitics, but later becomes a model of female empowerment
and ecological awareness. As for Barbauld, she was a friend of Erasmus Darwin, whose essay Phytologia,
though not openly political, was connected to radicalism. Both Darwin’s and Barbauld’s work imply, as
Verdier’s poem does, that reforming agriculture would lead to social and political change. Barbauld
prolonged this reflection by questioning the place of women in this new world in a context of political
turmoil with the Napoleonic wars. Yet, despite the hostility between France and England during this period,
this inaugural ecological reflection may also be seen to constitute a social and poetical network propitious
to the inter-fertilization of revolutionary ideas, knitting secret silk threads of peace between the two
countries, and the promise of a fertile future.
Keywords: Suzanne Verdier, Anna Barbauld, georgic, sericulture, ecofeminism.
Resumen
Vol 12, No 2
Este artículo explora cómo la tradición de la escritura de las geórgicas a principios del siglo XIX se
reinventa a través de puntos de vista ecofeministas en Francia e Inglaterra. Se centra en las obras de dos
poetas: las Géorgiques du Midi (Geórgicas del Sur de Francia, 1799-1812) de Suzanne Verdier y el poema en
inglés de Anna Barbauld "The Caterpillar" (“La Oruga”, 1815). A través de un análisis comparativo, este
artículo cuestionará las conexiones entre las tradiciones francesa e inglesa de las geórgicas y observará
cómo emergen las voces femeninas en los albores del Romanticismo, con reclamos ecopolíticos específicos
y nuevas representaciones poéticas. De hecho, Verdier dedica el primer canto de sus geórgicas francesas,
"El gusano de seda", a la sericultura, una práctica exclusivamente femenina, que inicialmente se presenta
como una forma de biopolítica represiva, pero luego se convierte en un modelo de empoderamiento
femenino y conciencia ecológica. En cuanto a Barbauld, era amiga de Erasmus Darwin, cuyo ensayo
Phytologia, aunque no abiertamente político, estaba relacionado con el radicalismo. El trabajo de Darwin y
Barbauld implica, así como lo hace el poema de Verdier, que reformar la agricultura conduciría a un cambio
social y político. Barbauld prolongó esta reflexión para cuestionar el lugar de las mujeres en este nuevo
mundo en un contexto de agitación política con las guerras napoleónicas. Sin embargo, a pesar de la
hostilidad entre Francia e Inglaterra durante este período, esta reflexión ecológica inaugural también puede
constituir una red social y poética propicia para el intercambio de ideas revolucionarias, tejiendo hilos
secretos de paz entre los dos países, y la promesa de un futuro fértil.
Palabras clave: Suzanne Verdier, Anna Barbauld, geórgicas, sericultura, ecofeminismo.
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Georgics?
The long eighteenth century was the golden age of the georgic revival on both sides
of the Channel. John Dryden’s English translation of Virgil’s poem in 1697 paved the way
for the development of British georgics. These texts often played with the codes of the
Virgilian tradition, shifting to descriptive poetry. French georgics were more classical.
Indeed, they were closer to the original Georgicon and always followed the same
structure: four cantos, in French alexandrines, 1 praising French farming and gardening in
didactic terms. The most famous example was Jacques Delille’s French Georgics (1804). 2
Delille was also the author of a 1770 versified translation of Virgil’s poetical works. Even
though his works were undeniably a milestone in the conception of French georgics, there
were many other georgic rewritings à la française before them: François-Etienne Gouge
de Cessières’s The Ornamental Gardens (1758), The Four Seasons (1763) by the Cardinal
of Bernis, or Pierre-Fulcrand de Rosset’s Agriculture (1777).
Did women writers also play a role in this eighteenth-century reshaping of
Virgilian georgics? Though Kevis Goodman and Rachel Crawford’s works opened new
perspectives in the study of modern georgics, all the most prominent writers of modern
georgics in the 18th century seem to be men. However, some women also took part in the
reinvention of the genre. An interesting theory of the origins of georgics was proposed by
Anna Barbauld in her 1794 preface to Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, which
was echoed in her later poem “The Caterpillar” in 1815. In France, only one female poet,
Suzanne Verdier, seems to have written French georgics. Both Barbauld and Verdier
wrote during a period of political turmoil which mirrored Virgil’s troubled times of fallen
powers and rising empires; both knew the joys of literary success and the pain of
marginalization. Was their conception of the georgic also revolutionary, or did they
exemplify a tradition of English or French georgic poetry?
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, née Aikin (1743-1825) is better known than Suzanne
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Verdier today. Born in a family of Dissenters, she received a nonconformist education
which encouraged her to develop her literary talents, as well as a taste for natural history
which she shared with her brother John. Her Lessons for Children were popular until
Barbauld fell into disgrace after having criticized the role of Britain in the Napoleonic wars
in her poem “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”. A few years later, in 1815, Barbauld wrote
her poem “The Caterpillar”, which is often seen as the perfect example of the Romantic
notion of interconnectedness between man and nature (Nichols 74). More recently, it has
also been analyzed as heroicomic and satirical (Smith 551) and related to Barbauld’s
political commitment (Den Otter 209). Analyzing it in the light of the georgic model may
reveal new perspectives about this poem but also on the evolution of Barbauld’s poetic
and political choices.
1 Alexandrines are lines of twelve syllables; they are the most common line in French poetry and are
considered as the “noblest”. The tragedies of Racine were written in alexandrines.
2 The original title in French is: L’Homme des Champs ou les Géorgiques Françaises. Hughes Marchal provides
more details on the popularity of Delille in France and in England, where the poet lived as an émigré during
the French Revolution (Marchal 1). His editorial success contributed to the ever-increasing popularity of
the georgic on both sides of the Channel.
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Georgics?
Suzanne Verdier, née Allut (1745-1813) was born in Montpellier. She was an
accomplished woman of the Enlightenment: having received the same education as her
brother, she was fluent in Greek, Latin, English and Italian, and Virgil was one of her
favourite poets. She saw the effects of the French Revolution, but also the dreadful
aftermath of the Terror, with civil war, conspiracy, and mass executions (her brother died
on the scaffold). After 1794, a lonely, broken-hearted woman, she took a keener interest
in farming and wrote her own georgics, Georgics of Southern France (Géorgiques du Midi)
between 1799 and 1812. Verdier’s poetic talents were officially acknowledged and
celebrated in her times: she was appointed “Maître des Jeux Floraux” in 1809. 3 However,
her names and works are largely forgotten now despite the efforts of her grandson,
Gustave Fornier de Clausonne, who republished most of her poems in his 1862 edition.
There is little scholarly criticism on them, except a few demeaning pages in a French
literary journal in 1989. Her name is also mentioned in a list of “forgotten female writers”
(Slama 91), which is sadly indicative of the work that still has to be done by teachers and
academics to rehabilitate such authors.
By comparing Barbauld’s poem “The Caterpillar” and Verdier’s first canto on
silkworms, which bear similarities in their themes and sociopolitical issues, this paper
will analyze both poems in the light of their possible connections with the georgic literary
tradition, to see if they could be defined as instances of an “eco-Georgic” or not
(Fairer 201). 4 Silkworms and caterpillars indeed seem to be used to subvert the
didacticism of the georgic on agricultural practices, by adding specific bioethical and
political concerns. This article will also question the possibility of early iterations of
ecofeminism in the georgic model, as it would be defined later by Carolyn Merchant:
Verdier’s poems and Barbauld’s show that women and nonhuman nature are both
marginalized and exploited, and this situation is precisely what raises questions about the
socio-cultural structures of power. New connections may then appear in a broken Europe
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to “reweave the world” 5 through a silken fabric of words, and a nature provided with an
agency of its own. 6
The Virgilian Model
“If Virgil really designed to instruct the farmer by his Georgics, he might have done
it much more effectually in plain prose” (Aikin 58): John Aikin’s view on the Georgics in
his 1777 Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry may sound a bit harsh.
Though Aikin was a true lover of Virgilian poetry, his criticism on the Georgics is unusually
3 “Maître des Jeux Floraux” (literally “Master of the Games of Flora”) was a highly honorific national
distinction in French poetic writing, the modern equivalent of which could be the status of Poet Laureate.
4 David Fairer indeed suggested to analyze Wordsworthian poetry in terms of “eco-Georgic” rather than
pastoral.
5 The expression “reweave the world” is used by Irene Diamond and Glorian Feman Orenstein in the title of
their pioneering essay on ecofeminism (1990).

6 For more information on ecofeminism and new materialism, especially regarding the notion of “agency”,
see Esther Rey Torrijos’s article on the history of ecofeminism (Torrijos 24-28) and Serpil Oppermann’s
chapter on the same subject (Oppermann 19-36).
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Georgics?
scathing: “we may lament that he pursued a plan that necessarily threw so much of his
work into details which even his versification cannot render pleasing” (Aikin 59). He
firmly stands against the danger of writing poetry for exclusively didactic purposes, to the
detriment of sensibility. He praises Thomson’s Seasons but despises authors who “shackle
themselves with teaching an art, or inculcating a system” (59).
His sister Anna may have changed his mind about didactic literature in general,
and more particularly the georgic. Her volume of children’s stories, Evenings at Home,
which she wrote together with her brother in 1792-1796, may be read in the continuity
of her former educational works, including Lessons for Children. While she was publishing
the first collections of their Evenings at Home, she also wrote a preface to the 1794 edition
of The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside, in which she defended didactic poetry,
as if to reply to her brother: “didactic, or preceptive poetry, seems to include a solecism,
for the end of Poetry is to please, and of Didactic precept the object is instruction. It is
however a species of poetry which has been cultivated from the earliest stages of society”
(Akenside 1). The terms “species” and “cultivated”, at the crossroads between biology and
literature, suggest a natural harmony between the poetry of nature and the nature of
poetry. 7
This fertile metaphor becomes clearer as Barbauld quickly shifts to the georgic,
which she regards as one of the earliest forms of didactic poetry and poetry in general. It
was invented “at first, probably, for the very simple purpose of retaining, by means of the
regularity of measure and the charms of harmony, the precepts of agricultural wisdom”
(Akenside 1). Then, poetry became an art, and the very purpose of this early didactic
poetry became different: the aim of poetry was not directly to instruct, but to help the
reader remember instructive lessons, while enjoying the pleasure of reading. Barbauld
makes it clear that the reader must have at least some previous knowledge on the subject
and mentions the example of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden published in 1792.
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Georgics must educate, but also please and move the reader: docere, placere, movere,
according to the famous Horatian principle. Contrary to her brother John, Anna Barbauld
praises Virgil’s Georgics and their pleasant descriptions of Italy (Akenside 5).
Suzanne Verdier agrees with the principles of modern georgics defined by
Barbauld. A certain sense of didacticism is also present in her Georgics of Southern France,
but she is always careful to maintain the fragile balance between technicality and
accessibility, so that her readers learn about technical details of farming in an accessible
yet elegant style. She follows the main precepts of the genre, moving “between praxis and
poesis” (Fairer 22). 8 She uses imperative forms, just as Virgil would do, to describe the
different steps in the process of wine-harvest, and she gives her readers advice by using
some of her characters as mouthpieces for instructive lessons. However, poetry prevails
over pedagogy, and her work is not strictly didactic.
7 Though the term “species” can be used as a synonym for “kind”, it may be understood metaphorically too.
The first use of “species” related to natural history dates back to the early seventeenth century according to
the Oxford English Dictionary. Its specific association with the verb “to cultivate” suggests a metaphorical
use, in keeping with Barbauld’s claims on georgic poetry.
8 David Fairer defines the georgic poet as “trapped between the pragmatic critic and the idealist critic”,
“forced to compromise between praxis and poesis” (Fairer 20).
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Georgics?
Verdier is not as critical as John Aikin on Virgil’s Georgics and she wants her own
poem to follow the tradition of Virgil. She pays tribute to the author of the Aeneid, “who
sang the tragedy of Troy”, and the Georgics, in which he “praise[d] the dances of the playful
bee”, when she introduces her first subject, sericulture, in an address to the silkworm:
If he who sang the tragedy of Troy,
The immortal voice of Dido’s grief and joy,
Finally tuned his lyre
To praise the dances of the playful bee,
Who could refuse to pay tribute to thee? (Verdier 33-34) 9
She draws a parallel between Virgil’s topic (the bee) and her own (the silkworm):
Virgil ended his Georgics on an insect; she shall begin hers with another. In each case, the
products of these insects, honey and silk, are metaphors of the sweetness of poetry,
characteristic of the placere-docere mission of the georgics, and closely connected to the
poetic recreation of rustic life. Verdier wants to mirror Virgil and give a faithful
transposition of his Georgics in modern France.
Moreover, Virgil’s Georgics provide a stylistic pattern for Verdier’s own georgics.
They were written in a style which was half-way between the low style of the Eclogues
and the high style of the Aeneid. Verdier chooses to represent this intermediate style in
her prosodic choices, with an alternation of alexandrines, the “noble” line, and
octosyllabics, the “lower” line. She also insists on her lines being humble, modest: “down
to earth”, “as humble as my song, my flight, from high to low, / Shall explore the hamlets,
the hills and the meadows” (Verdier 30). 10 The structure of Verdier’s poem is also a
reflection of Virgil’s Georgics. Both poems are divided into four cantos. Virgil’s Georgics
are based on the following structure: Canto I is on harvest; Canto II, on grape-harvest and
olive-trees; Canto III, on cattle; Canto IV, on beekeeping. Verdier follows a similar pattern,
replacing beekeeping with silkworm breeding: Canto I is on silkworms; Canto II, on
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harvest; Canto III, on grape-harvest and nut-picking; Canto IV, on olive-Trees.
Finally, the political context in which both Barbauld and Verdier write bears
similarities with Virgil’s. When Virgil wrote his Georgics, the Roman Empire had just
started to rise after years of civil war and the fall of the Roman Republic and Triumvirate,
with the advent of Octavius who became Emperor Augustus. At the time when Barbauld
wrote her later poems and Verdier published her georgics, France had also come out of a
civil war, with the Terror, and the Republic led by the Directoire had fallen with the
crowning of Bonaparte who became Emperor Napoleon. In each case, it was a time of
political turmoil and deep uncertainty.
Virgil did not say a word on the political context in his Georgics—at least, not
directly. 11 Barbauld and Verdier took a stand against an increasingly oppressive system:
9 « Si le chantre immortel des restes d’Ilion / Voulut bien consacrer à l’abeille volage / Cette lyre qui d’âge
en âge / Eternisa l’amour et les pleurs de Didon, / Qui pourrait de sa voix te refuser l’hommage ? »
10 The quotes from Verdier in English are my personal translation (no English translation has ever been
published). The original French text will be inserted as footnotes in the present article: «Terre à terre mon
vol, humble comme mes chants, / Parcourra les hameaux, la colline, la plaine.»
11 The idea of considering Virgil’s Georgics as part of the Augustan propaganda has been widely debated by
scholars, as the position of Virgil remains resolutely ambiguous. His Eclogues are more telling. For recent
scholarship on paradoxical politics in Virgil’s Georgics, see Fiachra Mac Góráin’s 2014 article. See also Greg
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Georgics?
Barbauld openly criticized the consequences of the British warlike policy in “Eighteen
Hundred and Eleven”. Verdier used the traditional model of georgic writing to articulate
a reflection on the radical political changes of her times. Moreover, she rewrote Virgil’s
Georgics to think about the place of women in this changing world, and to conceive ethical
farming as a key to social harmony. In this way, she replaced politics (from polis, the town)
with georgics (from georgos, farmer), which then are turned into an unexpected manifesto
for post-1794 France.
Paradoxically, the similarity of the political situation between Virgil, Barbauld and
Verdier brings those two women closer to Virgil than anyone has possibly ever been
before them, with the climate of civil war and the rise of a new empire. At the same time,
their attempt to blend the georgic with radical republican and proto-feminist reflections
also leads them away from their model.
Suzanne Verdier’s Revolutionary Georgics
The first canto of the Georgics of Southern France, “The Silkworm”, is dedicated to
sericulture (the cultivation of silkworms to produce silk). This choice is original for two
reasons: first, sericulture did not exist in Europe before the 13th century. No Greek or
Roman poet from the ancient times, no Hesiod, no Virgil had ever praised its virtues.
Second, sericulture in France and in England was generally a female practice. It was
mostly developed in the South of France where mulberry trees would grow. Male poets of
the 18th century generally described activities like ploughing or harvesting which were
shared by men and women.
In the late 18th century, sericulture was mainly an indoors activity: the eggs of silk
moths (bombyx mori) were found on the leaves of mulberry trees, the branches of which
were cut and moved inside the house where they were maintained at an even
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temperature. The eggs hatched and became larvae, or pupae. Pupae fed on mulberry
leaves and then secreted a cocoon of fine silk with their salivary glands, as a caterpillar
forms a chrysalis before its final transformation into a butterfly. However, in sericulture,
pupae were not given the opportunity to change into moths: indeed, the silken envelope
they had spun was taken out from them very quickly to be chemically preserved;
otherwise, the silk becomes rough after a few days. As for the pupae, they were doomed
to an untimely death, and were generally burnt, or boiled.
Sericulture was, then, a female activity because it conveniently fitted in the daily
routine of the farmers’ wives who sometimes had to stay at home to take care of their
youngest children. It also involved a lot of caring, which was considered as one of the
cardinal female virtues according to Rousseau in Emile. Verdier’s poem is naturally
addressed to women. It first seems to be didactic, using the second person plural (“you”)
and imperatives to describe the first steps of sericulture, with women tending the larvae
of the silk moth:
Ah! Work again, and work e’en more!
Garrard’s comment on the “overt politicisation” of Virgil’s Georgics and their posterity in 19th century
literature and politics (Garrard 119).
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Georgics?
And let your care, both day and night,

Keep them enclosed in clean delight;
Preserve their avid mouths from hunger,
And feed them well: the more, the better! (Verdier, 41-42) 12
Verdier then describes the almost motherly “care” (“soin” in French) of the female
cultivator of silkworms (which are called “nourrissons” in French, that is “babies”).
Verdier does not neglect any details about the transformations of the larvae and the
conditions of their survival (light, temperature, feeding), closely following the Virgilian
model in her technical precision. Women working in sericulture are identified as devoted
mothers. Thus, the reader first supposes that a traditional role of caregivers is attributed
to those women, a role which Carolyn Merchant, in her essay Earthcare: Women and the
Environment, connects with an influential representation of nature as female.
However, when she reaches the last stage of sericulture, Verdier strategically
changes her focalization: the addressee is not human anymore but becomes the silkworm
which is fatally destroyed by its cultivators, who keep only the silk and burn the animal
and mulberry leaves. The Virgilian model of the georgic is subverted in favour of the epic
model, as Verdier describes the flames burning the palace of the silkworm, like the walls
of Troy burning down in the Aeneid:
I can still see that cruel hand,
Tearing from every leafy tree
Thy silken treasures: shameful end!
In these obscure rooms, still I see
Thy vaults and walls consumed with fire,
The ruined halls and countless dead;
The choking smoke, rising higher,
Soon finds the place where thou hast fled,
And, slowly creeping to thy bed,
Changes at last with poisonous breath
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Thy troubled sleep into sharp death. (Verdier 45-46) 13
Through this epic depiction, the “animaux” are reduced to “maux”, or pain,
according to Jacques Derrida’s terminology, but the anthropomorphic depiction
paradoxically goes against anthropocentrism, as the agony of the silkworm, described in
epic terms, arouses the reader’s empathy, thus breaking up the boundaries between
human and animal. This is not a movement of vain tenderness, nor a mock-heroic parody
of the Aeneid, but an acknowledgment of a tyrannical biopolitical regime founded upon
utility. “So it was taken care of, so it was destroyed”: « l’intérêt en prit soin, l’intérêt le
proscrit » (Verdier 46). Verdier delights in hypotyposis and dramatic reversals: the
unexpected turn from motherly care to utter destruction could be read as an “anti-
pastoral” move (Gifford 42) criticizing the hypocrisy of a strictly mercantile system.
12 « Ah! Redoublez d’activité ! / La nuit comme le jour, que votre vigilance, / Entretienne autour d’eux l’ordre
et la propreté, / Et de leur faim surtout, servant l’avidité, / Sur eux à pleines mains répandez l’abondance. »
13 « Je la vois, cette main cruelle, / Arracher à chaque rameau / Les trésors confiés à sa garde infidèle ; / Je
vois, dans ces réduits obscurs. / Dont la flamme a rougi les voûtes et les murs, / Habitants et palais
amoncelés par elle. / L'étouffante vapeur qui pénètre soudain / Au fond du lieu qui te recèle / Passe bientôt
jusqu'à ton sein / Et te fait rencontrer enfin / Dans ta mort apparente une mort trop réelle. »
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Georgics?
Indeed, Verdier is not shocked only because innocent creatures are being
murdered, but because an individual life is being reduced to a commercial value. She
denounces the dangers of blind pragmatism over ecological awareness which leads to the
banalization of violence. What follows the address to the silkworm is a striking depiction
of Bellona, the goddess of war, spreading terror over the country:
Such are the deeds of dreadful War,
Barbaric Goddess! Won’t you cease
To ban the Arts from France’s shore,
The fearful children of our peace. (Verdier 48) 14
The allusions to the climate of the civil war of 1794 are transparent: the “Arts” are
“banned” from the shores of France, as Delille, among many other poets belonging to the
Church or aristocracy, had to emigrate to England, far away from the French guillotine.
The original French poem mentions “les arts et l’industrie”, implying that technical
knowledge on agriculture and manufacture is also under threat: industry is here
subservient to the productions of war. The criticism of violence done to animals is thus
hinged to political violence. In warfare, soldiers lose their individuality; they are not
recognized as individuals but merely as parts of a greater force, just as silkworms are not
recognized as individuals but merely as elements of the silk production.
“The Caterpillar”: from Bioethics to Politics
Verdier’s poem bears similarities to Barbauld’s better-known poem “The

Caterpillar”, written in 1815, even though Barbauld seems to step away from the
principles of the georgic genre. Barbauld describes the banalization of violence and an
ecological awakening made possible through an acknowledgment of individual life, as one
caterpillar hangs around her finger. This poem is probably not about sericulture, though.
Vol 12, No 2
Rather, it is about the Lackey caterpillar, as the specific description makes clear (Den Otter
209), 15 a moth caterpillar. Known as a notorious pest, this variety of caterpillar was not
used as a silkworm, though technically it is one.
An ingenuous reader dazzled by the beauty of the description (azure and orange
sides, silvery back, velvet skin) might think that Barbauld indeed is sparing an innocent
life and that the caterpillar should be saved. However, the lackey moth can be deadly to
an orchard, causing devastating damage to trees and vegetables. Realizing how deadly
this specific kind of caterpillar can be is the only way to understand the last line: “’tis not
virtue, / ‘Tis the weakness of a virtuous mind” (Barbauld 280). It would be a “virtue” for
the good farmer of the georgic to kill the last caterpillar. In a georgic poem, the author
would describe the different ways of struggling against the most notorious pests to
protect the young crops from certain devastation. Instead of following that convention,
14 « Des fureurs de Bellone infaillibles effets ! / C'est elle dont la barbarie / Exile de nos bords les arts et
l'industrie, / Timides enfants de la paix… »
15 Den Otter identifies the Lackey Caterpillar which indeed perfectly matches Barbauld’s specific and
colourful description: “For I have scanned thy form with curious eye, / Noted the silver line that streaks thy
back, / The azure and the orange that divide / Thy velvet sides…” (Barbauld 279).
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Georgics?
Barbauld describes the violence of pest control and sides with the caterpillar, turning the
criminal into a victim:
I have sought
With sharpened eye and persecuting zeal,
Where, folded in their silken webs they lay
Thriving and happy; swept them from the tree
And crushed whole families beneath my foot;
Or, sudden, poured on their devoted heads
The vials of destruction. (Barbauld 279)
What “vials” is Barbauld talking about? In the early 19th century, there were several
possibilities to control pests. Some of them were very innovative and were changing the
practices of gardening. They are described in Phytologia, a treatise on gardening and
agriculture written by Erasmus Darwin, who suggests using chemical solutions. Erasmus
Darwin conducted experiments with saturated solutions of lead and water to test the
resistance of the aphis (Darwin 365). It was an early form of pest control through
chemicals. 16
Erasmus Darwin was a friend of the Aikins (Aikin L. 26). Barbauld admired the
pleasant quality of his didactic poetry, as much as Darwin revered Barbauld’s educational
writings which he recommended in his 1797 essay on female education. 17 It is therefore
rather likely that he advised Barbauld and she, being interested in science, may have
reproduced Darwin’s agricultural experiments. If so, “The Caterpillar” would be one of the
first ecological works against the use of pesticides.
However, this poem is not only about pest control. Barbauld, just like Verdier, is
keenly aware that what is at stake is not merely spontaneous sympathy but attitudes
which are conditioning radical social and political changes. The maxim according to which
what is dangerous must be systematically destroyed potentially leads to the tyranny of a
biopolitical regime, involving different kinds of pests. Her comparison is the same as
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Verdier’s:
So the storm
Of horrid war, o'erwhelming cities, fields,
And peaceful villages, rolls dreadful on:
The victor shouts triumphant
[…] Yet should one,
A single sufferer from the field escaped,
Panting and pale, and bleeding at his feet,
Lift his imploring eyes, –the hero weeps;
He is grown human. (Barbauld 279)
Moving from cruelty against animals to human cruelty and warfare was not
uncommon. A person who beats his horse will soon beat his wife and kill his neighbour:
16 “There must be great difficulty in destroying the larvae, or grubs, or caterpillars, of many insects, which
are injurious to the fruits and kernels, as well as to the foliage of plants, by any chemical mixtures […] I
remember putting a worm […] into a saturated solution of sugar of lead in water.” (Darwin 365)
17 Darwin, Erasmus, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, Derby and London,
Drewry and Johnson, 1797. Evenings at Home is said to “join amusement with instruction” (13) and several
works of Barbauld (Hymns, Spelling-Books, Lessons) are quoted in Darwin’s educational catalogue at the end
of his essay.
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Georgics?
such was the morality of Hogarth’s engravings in The Four Stages of Cruelty. The argument
of violence against animals encouraging human cruelty had already been used by
Immanuel Kant. Other defenders of animals’ rights would use it: William Wilberforce in
England, and the Vicomte de Grammont in France. 18 Barbauld’s poem goes beyond the
strict didacticism of the georgic tradition, and even against it, by paradoxically siding with
pests and parasites.
Barbauld’s thoughts on the subject can be connected not only with Erasmus
Darwin’s reflections on agriculture in Phytologia but also with a wider anti-authoritarian
and scientifically minded tradition, including the work of Joseph Priestley, who was
another friend of Erasmus Darwin’s and a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham.
However, though Joseph Priestley was a radical thinker, he did not stand for animal rights:
Anna Barbauld tried to convince him to stop animal testing by writing “The Mouse’s
Petition” (1772), in which she lends a voice to a mouse trapped by the scientist for his
experiments. The ecological concerns of that text resonate with her later poem “The
Caterpillar”.
Thus, bioethics are closely connected with the political: paradoxically, the georgic
(from georgos, farmer) is blended with politics (from polis, the city), which makes this
poem truly satirical–satire being, etymologically, satura, blending. It is not a satire of the
georgic, though, but rather of the violence inherent in agricultural practices. Barbauld
steps away from georgic culture to create a counterculture against the arts of cultivation.
Town and country, animals and humans, struggle for life and national conflicts are
unexpectedly reunited in Verdier’s and Barbauld’s silkworm poems. Across borders both
poets seem to be in dialogue with each other, knitting secret threads between the orchard
garden and the political field, farming and warfare, France and England.
Verdier: Using the Georgic as an Ecofeminist Plea
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Verdier, bearing in mind that sericulture is a female practice, addresses women in
the final part of her first canto, as silkworm breeders who hold life and death in their
hands. She rejects gender stereotypes with a subtle irony:
You I address, fair sex among mankind,
You, whom by Fate were probably designed
To please, e’en though the sweet business of passion
Must never be women’s sole occupation… (Verdier 49) 19
By showing that women may have been created to please men, Verdier pretends
to comply with a flat, conventional vision of femininity, and her euphemism–pleasing
must not be a woman’s sole business–is tinged with a biting irony (“e’en though the sweet
18 The anthropocentric argument often prevailed in the first parliamentary debates against animal abuse:
mistreating an animal was thought to encourage violence against one’s wife or servants. For more details,
see Romanticism and Animal Rights, by David Perkins.
19 «C'est à vous d'y veiller et je m'adresse à vous, / Sexe que le destin fit sans doute pour plaire, / Mais dont
ce soin, quoique bien doux, / Ne doit pas toutefois être l'unique affaire…»
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Georgics?
business of passion”, “quoique bien doux”). Verdier thus shows that she is perfectly aware
of patriarchal gender stereotypes, but plays with them the better to distort them:
To the moth’s school, come and look,
Learn a page from love’s handbook,
And do observe with great attention
The worms to whom you owe all your lessons of fashion. (Verdier 50) 20
From a rustic cliché on feminine elegance in light octosyllabic lines, Verdier shifts
to a solemn reminder with the gravitas of the alexandrine. The usual comparison between
women and butterflies, reducing women to ephemeral elegance and vanity, is here
subverted by the harsh reality of silk produced by “worms”. Indeed, the fashionable silk
dresses worn by women can be made only by the sacrifice of the silk moth. Women are
then expected by Verdier to remember the real cost of this elegance by keeping in mind
the tragedy of the pupae’s death, and to be aware of the shared materiality of human
clothes and silk threads spun by nonhuman animals. By encouraging women to learn from
the tragic fate of the silkworm, she draws a comparison between the condition of women
in the late 18th century and the nonhuman forms of life exploited by mankind for profit,
which may be read in the wake of Merchant’s modern approach to ecofeminism. Indeed,
according to Carolyn Merchant, women and nonhuman nature have both been
marginalized and instrumentalized by patriarchal structures of power. This provides a
basis for ecological as well as political action.
Verdier recommends different practices: keeping the larvae alive until the end,
even though the silk is less beautiful afterwards. Moreover, she advises her readers not to
destroy the whole silken fabric but to spin it: it is not as good as silk, but it is still better
than to burn it all down. This practice goes against the laws of the market, as the silk will
not be as beautiful and solid and will probably be sold cheaper; its commercial value will
be diminished. Here Verdier stands against the tradition of georgic writing which, by
Vol 12, No 2
virtue of its anthropocentric didacticism, only aims at increasing agricultural production.
She creates a breach in this tradition to question its values and suggest different methods,
refusing the commercial totalitarianism of the late 18th century and the tyranny of
production and efficiency. She chooses to apply utilitarianism on a wider scale: that of
nature, to make it the sum of general happiness in a non-anthropocentric way, including
animals.
Yet, this nature is deeply interconnected with culture, a female culture, which is
both physical and intellectual, cultus meaning both culture and cultivation. The
occurrences of “nature” in Verdier’s text reveal a more shifting definition which
paradoxically moves toward aporia, or the impossibility of a strict definition of nature,
paving the way for more complex and radical questionings of this notion, such as Timothy
Morton’s, who will later criticize “nature” as an anthropomorphic construct secretly
subservient to man’s fantasies of domination. Nature is first personified as a generous
goddess (the word “nature” is feminine in French), but then becomes an ungraspable
power with “impenetrable secrets” (Verdier 130).
20« À l’école d’un papillon, / Venez apprendre comme on aime, / Et surtout discernez avec un soin extrême
/ Ceux à qui vous devez cette aimable leçon ».
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Georgics?
Women thus have the power to make change happen on a local and global scale,
encouraging social cohesion through ecological awareness and new practices. The first
canto ends on a very Virgilian eulogy of country life which is similar to Virgil’s last canto
on beekeeping:
If somewhere in our climes there is a sanctuary
Where quiet peace may hide,
It must be in a hamlet, peaceful and solitary
[…] There the factions’ madding trance,
The furious shouts and parties’ pride,
Never breaks up our silence. (Verdier 56-57) 21
The “parties” and “factions” are explicit references to the political dissensions
which had emerged from the revolutionary period: such lines would have been less
powerful before 1789, because there was no such thing as party politics in France yet.
Though Verdier rejects the political fights which led the country to civil war, her praise of
women’s power in the first canto may also remind the reader of the fact that women could
participate in the political debates during the French Revolution. Verdier certainly hoped
to see further advances in the rights of women and may have been disappointed by the
limited opportunities left to them by the Empire.
Barbauld: Refusing the Georgic Mode to Denounce a Biopolitical Tyranny
Barbauld’s poem could also be seen as an ecofeminist work in its own way. In
Barbauld’s time, gardening was considered a proper activity for women, just like
sericulture. Agricultural production had become crucially important, for several reasons.
First, during the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Erasmus Darwin would think that a
better agriculture, with better yields, would be intricately connected to moral and
Vol 12, No 2
intellectual progress. That was his first motivation when he wrote Phytologia. Second,
agriculture had become especially important after the Napoleonic wars and Napoleon’s
attempt to organize a continental blockade against the United Kindgom. The British
government needed agricultural production to be increased for the troops, as Barbauld
bitterly notices in another of her poems, “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”, written just a
few years before “The Caterpillar”:
The tramp of marching hosts disturbs the plough,
The sword, not sickle, reaps the harvest now,
And where the Soldier gleans the scant supply,
The helpless Peasant but retires to die… (Barbauld 233)
As Barbauld precisely compares pest-killing with warfare, her gesture is eminently

political in “The Caterpillar”: she refuses to obey the government’s demands for more
agricultural supply. This is not sabotage, as only one caterpillar is removed whereas all
the others have been eliminated, but it may be an inaugural gesture of resistance, an
embryo-revolution, to echo the “embryo nations” (Barbauld 279). By refusing to be on the
21 « Ah ! Si sous nos climats il existe un asile / Où la paix puisse se cacher, / C’est au sein d’un hameau
solitaire et tranquille […] La fureur des partis, les cris des factieux / Jamais de nos échos ne troublent le
silence ».
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Georgics?
side of mass agricultural production, dictated by a patriarchal regime based upon

biopolitical control, Barbauld acts as a rebel. She does not only commune with the
parasite, but she is herself seen as such a one after the publication of “Eighteen Hundred
and Eleven”, a pamphlet against Britain’s commitment in the Napoleonic war. 22
One question remains: does Barbauld suggest alternative solutions for pest
control, as Verdier does? Such solutions already existed, but only for trees, not for
cabbages, for instance, or any other vegetable which would have been the caterpillar’s
favourite meal. Once again, such solutions could be found in Darwin’s Phytologia: one
option was, in autumn, to take the fallen leaves of the trees and make a heap of them with
the addition of lime and other vegetable components, cover with soil, wait for
fermentation and then use it as manure (Darwin 248).
Barbauld could have chosen to expatiate on harmless solutions for pest controls in
a georgic fashion. After all, it would have matched her reputation as a didactic writer, and
it would have provided a nice morality to her poem. It would have made it fit for children
and become an optimistic educational fable. It would also have become a nice eco-friendly
poem for readers of the 21st century concerned with global environmental crisis and
looking for more respectful agricultural practices.
But Barbauld chose not to do so. Contrary to Suzanne Verdier or Charlotte Smith
who subtly play with Virgilian intertextuality, 23 she refused the georgic mode, precisely
because she refused the didactic value which is correlated with the imperative of better
yields, as well as economic and military power. Virgil would be elusive on politics in his
Georgics because he was the protégé of the Emperor. Barbauld said nothing (at least
explicitly) on politics for the opposite reason: because she was on the other side, and she
refused to bring help to a system of biopolitical oppression which crushed female writers
and poor peasants the same way a gardener would crush an insect.
Instead, she ended her poem with “Tis not Virtue, / Yet 'tis the weakness of a
Vol 12, No 2
virtuous mind”, which contributed to re-asserting her reputation as a virtuous thinker,
even though many considered “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” as a political betrayal. The
true morality may be that this weakness is strength, because a tiny weakness, a soft spot
in the silken fabric of political power is enough to tear up the whole piece. Weakness in a
highly patriarchal, bellicose system means the ability to escape control. The weakness of
the lyrical persona contrasts with the “virtus” in Virgilian poetry, an ideal of manhood
based on strength, reason and temperance, embodied by the male heroes of the Aeneid. It
is also an echo of the “Roman virtue” mentioned in “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”, in a
passage ridiculed by the Quarterly Review. It is finally the last remnant of her own
reflection on the georgic in her preface of Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, where
didactic poetry was supposed to “breathe the love of virtue” (Akenside 3). The weakness
in Barbauld’s poem is not a virtue from a conventional point of view, but it is, in itself, an
alternative: the way of parasites (biologically and metaphorically), the road not taken by
farming: one that goes far, very far into the undergrowth, beyond the rich fields and the
closed meadows of the georgic.
22 See the scathing criticism published in the Quarterly Review in June 1812.
23 See Juan Pellicer’s article for more details on Charlotte Smith’s connections with the Virgilian hypotext.
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Georgics?
Conclusion
Using or not using the georgic mode in the 18th century could be a significant
choice, poetically as well as politically. Suzanne Verdier closely followed the Virgilian
tradition in her poem which may be considered as an early manifestation of the
ecofeminist mindset. Anna Barbauld, on the contrary, refused to follow the georgic
tradition, despite its poetic elegance and didacticism which are often to be found in her
previous works. Both women used what was considered as a female quality (“care” for
Verdier and “weakness” for Barbauld) to turn it against traditional social and poetical
representations and criticize the violence inherent in agricultural practices, as well as the
tyranny of productivity. Thus, they opened the georgic genre to the ecophilosophical
questionings of the age of sensibility. However, because of Verdier’s late publication, and
Barbauld’s choice of tacit resistance, this ecofeminist turn remained silent for a long time.
Nevertheless, the fact that the georgic model is used and subverted by female
authors to reflect upon the condition of women makes it outstanding in the long tradition
of georgic writing. Verdier’s and Barbauld’s poems are gendered critiques on agricultural
practices on a male-dominated field of writing. The slow, vegetative growth of such poems
finally revealed a female radicalism, the term “radicalism” itself being understood as a
dynamic border-crossing force. This radicalism shows that their poems, and the political
ambitions that they carry, do not belong to a human culture which is apart from nature:
on the contrary, politics must be firmly rooted in the ground, in the earthly world from
which they have sprung. They carry a biopolitical strength closely linked to the earth (as
“radix” originally means “root”), cultivating an agricultural as well as intellectual soil in
which seeds of feminist revolutions may grow in the vast field of literature, and keep
blossoming in the vast field of georgics, among butterflies, silk-moths and mulberry-trees.
Vol 12, No 2
Submission received 19 May 2020 Revised version accepted 5 September 2021
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Author: Mannon, Ethan Title: Georgic Marvel: Agriculture and Affect
Georgic Marvel: Agriculture and Affect
Ethan Mannon
Mars Hill University, United States
[email protected]
Abstract
How do humans respond, emotionally and psychologically, to georgic spaces and places? What do
we think and feel when we encounter “working landscapes”—those rural places (primarily farms, but also
mines and working forests) where labor produces goods that meet our material and metabolic needs?
Despite increasing attention to the georgic literary tradition, these questions remain unsettled. In fact, much
of the growing body of georgic scholarship disagrees about the kinds of responses generated by georgic
landscapes. One task that remains, then, is to map the current scholarly terrain and synthesize, if possible,
a theory of georgic affect. A related, equally important task is to ground such a theory as much as possible
in the realities of soil and sun and water. Without attention to such fundamentals, the georgic mode will
likely remain solely the property of academics or, equally unfortunate, become as steeped in myth and
therefore as untethered from the material world as the pastoral mode. Thus, in “Georgic Marvel” I derive
from scholarship and experience a nuanced but intelligible concept describing the human response to
georgic places. In short, my intention is to begin to do for working landscapes what the concept of the
sublime has done for wilderness. I argue that the experience of georgic places generates marvel and
humility. At least two different kinds of catalysts initiate this reaction: encounters with either an epic past
or with some kind of biotic mystery trigger marvel—a kind of negative hubris that tears down
anthropocentrism by reminding us of the past and of other actors and agents. In its challenge to our self-
centeredness, georgic marvel approximates the sublime, but relates to a different land use category and
represents a distinct response. Whereas terror is integral to the experience of the sublime, georgic marvel
creates intrigue and curiosity rather than fear. Marvel leads us deeper. The article concludes with an
exploration of the ways in which a theory of georgic affect rooted in marvel would productively reorient
our understanding of the human place in the world.
Vol 12, No 2
Keywords: Georgic, affect, marvel, sublime, agriculture.
Resumen
¿Cómo responden afectiva y psicológicamente los seres humanos a los espacios geórgicos? ¿Qué se
piensa y se siente cuando uno se encuentra con “entornos laborales”, esos espacios rurales (principalmente
granjas, pero también minas y bosques) donde el trabajo humano produce los bienes satisfacen nuestras
necesidades materiales y metabólicas? A pesar de un creciente interés por la tradición literaria geórgica,
estas cuestiones siguen sin respuesta. De hecho, mucha de la investigación sobre este asunto no está de
acuerdo con las respuestas humanas generadas por los paisajes geórgicos. Una tarea pendiente, entonces,
es esquematizar la investigación actual y luego sintetizar, si es posible, una teoría del afecto geórgico. Otra
tarea igualmente importante es fundamentar dicha teoría en las realidades de la tierra, el sol y el agua tanto
como sea posible. Sin prestar atención a estos principios básicos, el modo geórgico quedará vinculado
únicamente a la esfera académica o, de forma igualmente desafortunada, se volverá lleno de aspectos
míticos y, por lo tanto, desconectado del mundo físico como por ejemplo el género pastoral. En este artículo
exploro la investigación y la experiencia, y de ellas obtengo conceptos matizados pero inteligibles que
describen la respuesta humana a los lugares geórgicos. En resumen, mi intención es empezar a hacer por
los entornos laborales lo que el concepto de lo sublime ha hecho por los territorios salvajes. Defiendo que la
experiencia de los lugares geórgicos provoca asombro tanto como humildad. Hay por lo menos dos
catalizadores que inician esta reacción: un encuentro con vestigios de un pasado épico o con algún tipo de
“misterio biótico” que desencadena el asombro, algo como una arrogancia negativa que destruye el
antropocentrismo al recordarnos el pasado y otros actores y agentes. En este desafío a nuestro
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egocentrismo, el asombro geórgico se parece a lo sublime, pero se relaciona con otra categoría de uso de la
tierra y representa una respuesta diferente. Mientras que el terror es fundamental en la experiencia de lo
sublime, el asombro geórgico produce intriga y curiosidad más que temor. El asombro nos lleva más a lo
profundo. Este artículo concluye explorando las maneras en las que una teoría del afecto geórgico basada
en el asombro nos reorientaría de forma productiva hacia una nueva comprensión de nuestro lugar en el
mundo.
Palabras clave: Geórgico, afecto, asombro, sublime, agricultura.
Wonder is a feeling that is endangered, which puts me in a luckless position, since I am

perhaps addicted to it. I get to jonesing for wonder. I have measured my life in its moments,
and I have defined the quality of my life by its presence. When it happens, I am.
--Janisse Ray, Drifting into Darien
enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the
temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then,
is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.
--Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life
How do humans respond, emotionally and psychologically, to georgic spaces and

places? What do we think and feel when we encounter “working landscapes”—those rural
places (primarily farms, but also mines and working forests) where labor produces goods
that meet our material and metabolic needs? 1 Despite increasing attention to the georgic
literary tradition, 2 critics have not directly addressed questions regarding the emotional
impact of georgic places. One task that remains, then, is to map the current scholarly
terrain and synthesize, if possible, a theory of georgic affect. A related, equally important
task is to ground such a theory as much as possible in the realities of soil and sun and
water. Without attention to such fundamentals, the georgic mode will likely remain solely
the property of academics or, equally unfortunate, become as steeped in myth and
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therefore as untethered from the literal world as the pastoral mode. Thus, my goal in this
article is to derive from scholarship and experience a nuanced but intelligible concept
describing the human response to georgic places. In short, I aim to begin to do for working
landscapes what the concept of the sublime has done for wilderness.
This article’s exploration of human responses to georgic places aligns with affect
theory (in broad terms) and Jane Bennett’s work on enchantment in particular. Regarding
affect, I share with Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino—the editors of Affective
Ecocriticism—the premise that “place profoundly shapes our emotional lives” (2).
Because affect theory de-emphasizes discourse and instead focuses on “reactions” that
begin with “the senses, the personal and the body,” ecocritics who value embodied
experience can draw upon affect theory as one way to articulate the power certain places
1 Cannavo defines “working landscapes” as “agricultural lands characterized by a long-standing balance

between human and natural forces” (220). See also Conlogue, whose focus on the anthracite coal region of
Eastern Pennsylvania expands the definition of working landscape beyond farms.
2 Along with the publications I go on to cite in the next section, see note 32 in my 2016 article for a fuller
accounting of the scholarly engagements with the georgic mode.
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have to elicit a (human) response (Berberich, Campbell, and Hudson 1). My own
reflections have suggested to me that the way I respond to place aligns with the branch of
affect theory that “understands affect as asignifying, precognitive bodily experience”
(Bladow and Ladino 5). 3 As Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth put it, “affect is
persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s
obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as invitations” (1). As I discuss below, place
has the power to interrupt intellectual reverie and to overwhelm rationality and, in the
process, to produce captivating experiences.
Jane Bennett, in The Enchantment of Modern Life, describes such experiences (or
“encounters”) with striking language. For Bennett, “enchantment” is an “odd combination
of somatic effects” wherein a person is “simultaneously transfixed in wonder and
transported by sense” (5). The tension between being “both caught up and carried away”
produces the state of spellbinding immobilization mentioned in the second epigraph.
Bennett also uses “wonder” to describe this condition. I use marvel in this article to signify
a form of wonder or enchantment generated by working landscapes and especially by
being at work in such places. Defined narrowly, marvel is wonder or enchantment that
manifests in a georgic context; put another way, georgic labor makes marvel. Thus, marvel
has much in common with the states described by Ray and Bennett in the epigraphs, but
using a unique term—and, importantly for me, the term used most often in the translation
of Virgil’s Georgics completed by H. Rushton Fairclough and subsequently revised by G. P.
Goold 4—enables one to recognize not only the connections between georgic marvel and
related scholarship, but also some subtle distinctions.
Order in a Fallow Field: Georgic Literary Criticism
Critics regularly define the georgic and distinguish it from the pastoral and epic
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modes by focusing on humans’ physical response to georgic places. Scholars of the georgic
mode agree that humans respond to agricultural land with labor; in fact, one could go so
far as to say that the labor requisite to farming serves as the organizing principle of the
georgic mode. 5 Such work yields crops, certainly, but just as important to Thomas L.
Altherr, also the satisfaction that comes from completing a task and earning one’s rest:
“the farmer must work hard and rejoice in weariness as a worthwhile recompense” (110).
Over a period of years or perhaps generations, this pattern of work and rest produces an
intense knowledge of the land. In a 2016 article, I argue that in georgics this kind of
intimate knowledge manifests as a deep sense of place that I call “georgic
environmentalism.”
3 Bladow and Ladino follow this “vein” of affect theory through Brian Massumi and Kathleen Stewart back
to Gilles Deleuze’s work on Baruch Spinoza. For more on this tradition of Affect Theory, see Melissa Gregg’s
and Gregory J. Seigworth’s The Affect Theory Reader, pages 5-6.
4 Though questions of translation from the Latin are valid and perhaps compelling, they are well beyond the
abilities of this writer.

5 In his definitive The Georgic Revolution, Anthony Low explains that The Georgics “is preeminently about
the value of hard and incessant labor” (8). Low uses the centrality of this characteristic to delineate between
the pastoral mode that “celebrates play and leisure” and the georgic mode that “celebrates work” (4).
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Writing in 1989, Alan Liu also indicates that work defines georgic, but he argues
that an important consequence of agricultural labor is the repression of the past. In his
oft-quoted formulation, Liu says that “georgic is the supreme mediational form in which
to bury history in nature . . . it is the form in which history turns into the background, the
manure, of landscape” (18). Liu thus contends that humans respond to georgic places by
focusing on the present and the future as well as the landscape itself. However, his manure
metaphor betrays a fundamental lack of agricultural experience. However much one
might like for piled manure to fade into the background, its aroma and the buzzing flies
drawn by the same tend to attract attention. Further, even after a farmer spreads or tills
in manure, a discerning eye can sense its presence. Indeed, the visible effect of manure—
improved plant growth and vigor—is the point. Manure provides, then, a poor analogy for
the deliberate repression of the past Liu has in mind; rather, manure more accurately
represents the constant cycling of past, present, and future inevitably involved in farming.
The work of both Kevis Goodman and of Karen O’Brien also challenges Liu’s
argument. Goodman actually cites Liu before going on to argue in her 2004 monograph
that a vital function of georgic poetry is to turn up the past. She points to the passage
towards the end of Virgil’s First Georgic wherein an unnamed farmer’s plowing unearths
the remnants of a forgotten war: “javelins eaten up with rusty mould,” as well as “empty
helms” and “giant bones” (I. 493-97). Recognizing the incongruity between this kind of
dis-covering and Liu’s claims, Goodman argues that this passage highlights the inevitable
surfacing of history in the georgic mode, and that the farmer represents the “sensory
discomfort” that always accompanies such an encounter (3). Such moments, she says,
generate “unpleasurable feeling” and “cognitive dissonance”—mental and emotional
states that she finds integral to the experience of georgic places (3, 8). For Goodman, then,
farmers respond to georgic places with difficulty; confronting the past seems to generate
a kind of existential crisis. Goodman’s argument reaches a confluence with the work of
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O’Brien insofar as they agree about history informing the georgic mode. However, O’Brien
associates no shame, guilt, or “cognitive dissonance” with the farmer’s encounter with
history. Instead, she argues that georgic texts serve an imperialist function and designedly
express the “elation of empire” (162). Humans respond to farms and farming, she
suggests, by implicitly celebrating the battles that opened land for cultivation or that
protect it from invasion.
Taken together, the last thirty years of scholarship on the georgic mode presents a
frustrating tangle of human responses to georgic places. Working landscapes require
labor, which produces weariness and satisfaction as well as, eventually, a sense of place
(Altherr; Mannon). However, that same labor can also generate, depending on the critic
you read, obfuscation of the past (Liu), an unpleasant encounter with history (Goodman),
or a kind of national pride rooted in imperialism, past and present (O’Brien). The human
figure on the land, then, plays a variety of roles: denizen of the local practicing a nascent
deep ecology, patriotic citizen of the nation-state, lay historian in crisis over agricultural
imperialism, or a simple earth worker with a gift for repressing the past altogether. How
can one account for such multitudinous and divergent accounts of responses to georgic
landscapes? Is there order to be found within a field that appears so overgrown? I contend
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that the experience of marvel offers a promising beginning. Though scholarship on the
georgic mode does not reach a consensus, each of the literary critics discussed above
suggests that georgic experiences lead to encounters that humble; humans come up
against something outside of themselves—whether a relic from a prior epoch, a sense of
one’s connection to an imperialist nation-state, or an awareness of natural cycles that
predate and will outlast a lifetime of work—that stifles the ego. At least two kinds of
catalysts prompt such moments of marvel: 1) uncovering human-made relics, often
associated with an epic past, and 2) observing biotic events. A thorough accounting of
these triggers suggests that marvel belongs on the list of things produced by georgic
landscapes and by the labor that occurs upon them.
Uncovering the Past: Georgic Archaeology
Because georgic landscapes are often seeded with artifacts, working the earth can
lead to the discovery of relics that, in turn, prompt marvel. Indeed, Virgil models this
sequence of events in the passage already mentioned. Having uncovered signifiers of an
epic past, the farmer in The Georgics reacts with “marvel”—a word coding the sudden
appearance of javelins and helmets as miraculous. Goodman reads the farmer’s marvel as
an initial stage leading to discomfort. 6 While provocative and even possible—farmer is no
monolithic category and Virgil’s fictional agricola could have had any number of thoughts
and feelings, including unpleasurable ones—I find Goodman’s approach narrow and
restrictive. In particular, her reading doesn’t apply very well to the farmers I have
known—thoughtful and intelligent men and women for whom marvel and miracles would
be more likely to generate curiosity and fascination than an existential crisis. Maybe
Goodman and I know very different sets of farmers. More likely, I think, is the possibility
that I am focusing here on the farmer’s experience, while Goodman is also considering the
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poet’s or scholar’s imagination. While she and I agree that a georgic context provides an
opportunity for history to break into human consciousness and demand consideration, I
view this passage in The Georgics as a moment when the past functions as a positive or at
least a neutral disruption—troubling perhaps, but maybe also amazing. Though surprise
certainly confounds the farmer, he need not emerge from the experience feeling only
cognitive dissonance. Indeed, affect scholar Brian Massumi suggests that this kind of
“shock” eventually transforms into a “positive” feeling because it help’s one perceive
“one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability” (36). Jane Bennett’s
formulation of enchantment as a blend of pleasure and the uncanny (unheimlich) that
creates “childlike excitement” applies here as well: what begins as a neutral or negative
feeling might later emerge as joy (5). Other encounters with relics—epic or not—in a
georgic context underscore the potentially positive resonance of marvel.
My own mundane version of a discovery made while working the earth occurred
in the backyard of a rental property on Puddintown Road in State College, Pennsylvania.
6 For Goodman, the farmer’s sense of his place on the land and in its history becomes complicated.
Confronted by the bones of giants, she implies that the farmer realizes that his fields were once a
battleground, and may have even been home to a different people than his ancestors.
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I offer this narrative not because it provides any kind of final and absolute proof (it does
not), but because my experience informs my perception and shapes this argument in a
way sharing much in common with other scholars who have employed narrative
scholarship. 7 Weeks after tilling up the backyard sod to install a garden, 8 my hoe clinked
against another piece of metal. Reaching down into the soil, I found and lifted out a
triangular piece of rusted metal, not much bigger than a silver dollar coin. Sharpened
along two edges and blunt on the third, I had enough agriculture in my biography to
recognize the tooth from a sickle-bar mower. Though I was at work on a dissertation
exploring twentieth-century American literature and the georgic mode, I think I would
have reacted with marvel anyway. I was, after all, holding tangible proof of the crop-field
or pasture that preceded suburbia on this piece of earth. Though this tooth was designed
to sever blades of grass and other plants, it connected me to a remote past—perhaps to
the era of horse power and ground-driven implements; more likely to the more recent
epoch of fossil fuel and power-take-offs. Either way, I thought harder about where I was
and when I was. I looked around and imagined the textures of the landscape before the
crop of single-family homes sprouted in the 1960s. That thinking resulted in deeper
enplacement—situated in the same space but now being confronted by something from
its history and the succession of human cultures upon it. 9 On the one hand I had stumbled
upon a forgotten, rusted, useless chunk of metal; on the other hand, I felt lucky. I still have
that tooth and remember the marvelous surprise that accompanied its appearance.
A scene from a 1992 book by Peter Svenson titled Battlefield: Farming a Civil War
Battleground also recalls Virgil’s accidental archaeologist, but Svenson’s account contains
no ambiguity about the positivity of the moment. As one might predict from the title,
Svenson fills his book with discoveries that flatten time; his own historical moment
constantly intersects with the past. There is, though, an element of predictability to these
encounters, especially given that relic hunters often set out to find artifacts on his
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property. As Svenson explains, “the creek that ran through the woods at the bottom of the
ravine was a favorite wading place for children because of the cannonballs that turned up
in the mud” (17). Clearly, the discoveries in Svenson’s book are of a different kind than
those of Virgil’s farmer or my own. First, the cannonballs are not uncovered by plowing
or by some other agricultural work; Svenson’s grammar suggests that they do the turning
themselves. Also, the appearance of the cannonballs does not interrupt the children; they
are not transported out of their work into a different time and landscape. Instead, the
children operate with expectation—their wading is an active seeking of the past.
Ron Rash’s 2006 novel The World Made Straight also features Civil War relic
hunting, and directly relates the manifestation of epic artifacts to other agricultural
uncoverings. The characters in the novel return, repeatedly, to the site of the Shelton
Laurel Massacre in Madison County, North Carolina, where in the winter of 1862-63,
7 See Slovic 28; Marshall 7, 8, 147; and Tallmadge 36.

8 I had a lenient landlord; we agreed that if the next tenant wanted lawn, I would seed the garden to grass.
9 I discovered the tooth from the sickle-bar mower before reading Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art,
and Everyday Life; however, my experience closely aligns with the affect “chain reaction” described by the
editors. They write that “what affect . . . achieves is to . . . make us think” (2). From that thinking, the affected
moves outward from self toward an engagement with the land and its history.
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Confederate troops summarily executed thirteen prisoners. 10 When the characters in The
World Made Straight visit the site of the killings, their use of a metal detector helps them
discover a pair of eyeglasses that they believe must have belonged to David Shelton, only
twelve years old in 1863, the youngest of the victims. Though they are already awed by
the place because it “feels more real than [they] are,” the appearance of the glasses
prompts even greater reverence (86). They marvel about “the glasses literally rising up
out of the past” (170).
Rash emphasizes the unearthing of the eyeglasses by including other moments
when the past bursts into the present. The central character in the novel, Travis Shelton,
seems born to contemplate the past. Arriving at the site of the massacre for the first time,
he is struck by the gravitas of the place, but remembers feeling a similar sensation more
than once before:
that was what he felt, not just now but over the years when he’d turned up arrowheads
while plowing. Rubbing off the layers of dirt, he’d always had the bothersome notion the
arrowheads were alive, like caddis flies inside their thick casings. He’d tried to make sense
of the notion that time didn’t so much pass as layer over things, as if under the world’s
surface the past was still occurring. Travis had never spoken of this feeling because it was
something you couldn’t explain or show, . . . But just because it was inside you didn’t mean
it wasn’t real. (86; emphasis in original)
Like the metal detector he later uses, Travis seems to be an instrument particularly
sensitive to the temporal dimensions of a place. Instinctually understanding himself as
only the most recent layer of human culture, he notices or seeks evidence of the past, and
marvels at his discoveries. His gift for historical thinking is nurtured by Leonard Shuler, a
former history teacher aware of the connection between the Shelton Laurel site and other
blood-soaked grounds. As Shuler and Travis undertake a kind of independent study
together, the older man is surprised to see Travis linking Civil War atrocities to similar,
international events, like the persistent unearthing of “cartloads of bones . . . planted
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outside Stalingrad in the winter of 1942” (Rash 272). Rash’s novel provides, then, an
insistent fusing of working landscapes and history; because the past refuses to remain
buried, turning the ground and working the earth provide frequent opportunities for
artifacts to appear and, in the process, to generate marvel.
Rash’s novel also equates the deliberate search for relics with the kind of
agricultural activities that inadvertently reveal them. Travis Shelton makes no distinction
between the use of a metal detector at the site of the Shelton Laurel massacre and the
plowing that uncovers arrowheads. Each activity generates a marvelous encounter with
the past.
There are, of course, notable differences between the experience of the relic
hunters in Rash’s and Svenson’s texts on the one hand and the earth worker in the
Georgics on the other; however, they all arrive, finally, at marvel. The sweat-soaked
plowman is interrupted by the intrusion of an epic past that demands consideration. He
is wrenched out of the present and, in Virgil’s description, his concentration on his work
10Rash cites an account of the massacre in a July 1863 issue of the New York Times and acknowledges
Paludan’s book. See also Williams 178-79.
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is replaced by marvel. Conversely, Civil War relic hunters operate with expectation; they
explore a landscape with a known epic past in search of relics. Thus, their discoveries
surprise them less than the unexpected appearance of javelin points and human bones.
However, operating with expectation does not eliminate the possibility of marvel. Some
might even argue that the act of searching builds anticipation, and thus heightens the
emotional response to a discovery. Those who have walked a cultivated field after a
sprinkling of rain in search of arrowheads would agree, I think, that the actual discovery
remains marvelous. In short, surprise and delight can find even the deliberate seeker.
Wading in a creek hoping to find cannonballs and wielding a metal detector in search of
relics are linked to the moments when working the earth uncovers mementos: all these
encounters involve bodies moving across the land and bumping into some kind of
affective object that transports one’s mind to an earlier era and prompts one to reflect on
the succession of land use. The next section builds upon the idea that georgic affect
includes more than the unexpected occurrence of marvel: the mode also models the
search for and cultivation of marvel. Marvel results not only from accidental discoveries
that interrupt farming; marvel also blooms forth from deliberate action.
Studying the Present: Georgic Agro-Ecology
In The Georgics, the uncovering of epic artifacts that transport one to a prior epoch
provides only a single moment of marvel. Far more often, marvel results from the
behavior of nonhuman actors common to agricultural landscapes. Though a farmer or
horticulturalist works with a particular end in mind, the arrival of that moment, as well
as the several stages leading up to it, nevertheless produces amazement and wonder that
force one into an intense consciousness of the present. Virgil’s account of grafting
provides an example. After listing instructions, Virgil imagines what will result from a
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successful graft: “in a little while, lo! a mighty tree shoots up skyward with joyous boughs,
and marvels at its strange leafage and fruits not its own” (II. 80–82). These lines
reverberate with excitement: along with “marvels” as a verb, the word joyous and the
interjection with its exclamation point underscore the surprise generated by a successful
graft. In Virgil’s poem, the surprise belongs to the plant itself due to its own production of
“strange” leaves and fruit. How much more remarkable should the growth and fruiting of
plants be to humans? Though utterly commonplace, germination and growth are
marvelous.
For me, a bountiful tuber harvest exemplifies a biotic source of marvel. Uncovering
full hills of Purple Vikings from the same garden where I unearthed the sickle-bar-mower
tooth created joy. Though I had planted the chunks of seed potato and watched the plants
grow, bloom, and wither, I did not know what the soil held. Finding those potatoes—orbs
of sunlight in the form of carbohydrates—provided a sensation that we routinely
undermine with words like fruition that make a metaphor out of something so solid and
real.
My initial experience with growing sweet potatoes led to an even greater sense of
gratitude. First-time homeowners since April 8, my wife and I spent our first month
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cleaning, painting, and hauling furniture while we both also pulled the long shifts that
accompany the end of the semester. The time we spent creating a triage garden felt like
thievery—time stolen from piles of papers and exams, or from drop cloths, rollers, and
brushes. This meant that many things went into the garden late. I was particularly
skeptical about the sweet potatoes’ chances. The young plants were so past their prime
that the garden center had dropped their price, drastically, and I wondered if they were
called “slips” because they were rapidly sliding toward compost. High temperatures, lack
of rainfall, and our soil composition meant that the empty portion of our back yard garden
patch had baked to a consistency more suited to tennis than tilling. Nevertheless, I socked
in a double row using the best plants and wished them well. I didn’t bother with the
sorriest slips (many had lost all their leaves), but, as an experiment, potted them in a
single quart sized container. After a week’s time and occasional watering, I beheld the
marvel of regeneration. What to do now? The garden was full, and dry. Hating not to
reward these plants’ determination, we set them out between the front walkway and a
retaining wall. And they grew! (Proximity to a spigot certainly helped). When frost
threatened, I bagged the best of the greens for the crisper drawer, and forked through the
soil. Digging potatoes requires a meditative focus on the present; if the mind wanders into
the past or the future, the digger is more likely to overlook or pierce a potato. Thus, I was
living moment-to-moment as I turned the soil in search of tubers. The total harvest was
nothing impressive, and none of the individual tubers were larger than a softball. Still, I
was glad for each one: in part because the garden sweet potatoes all but failed, but also
because even though the odds were stacked against these plants, they produced.
Marvelous and tasty tenacity.
Though Virgil makes clear the marvels of plant life, the clear title-holders in The
Georgics are honey bees. Especially in their remarkable unknowability honey bees
embody marvel. In his description of swarming, Virgil refers to the “strange joy” felt by
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the hive as its numbers grow (IV. 51-66). Just as the Roman poet imagined a grafted tree
would marvel at its own growth and production, here Virgil imagines that the bees and
the hive experience a kind of delight. When the swarm emerges, humans are able to
participate in the “joy” that is literally spilling out of the hive: Virgil notes that observers
will instinctively “marvel at the dark cloud trailing down the wind” (51-66). Virgil’s use of
marvel to describe the human reaction to the sight of a traveling swarm likely grows out
of the sheer number of unknowns involved in the apiculture of his time. Thus, Virgil
suggests marvel as a response to the manifold mysteries of beekeeping.
In The Queen Must Die (1985), William Longgood echoes and expands on Virgil’s
association between honey bees and marvel. In fact, Longgood focuses on the
“commonplace biological miracle[s]” he routinely witnesses among his bees that
nevertheless leave him with unanswered questions (19). As he explains, many of their
characteristics and behaviors present “profound mysteries” to the human observer (15).
For example, apiculturists understand the mechanics of swarming and can even take steps
to prevent it, but the specifics continue to confound: “who decides to swarm and when?
Who goes and who stays? How is the selection made? . . . Who is in charge of logistics? . . .
Efforts to resolve some of the mystery surrounding swarming have brought more
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questions than answers” (130). Similarly, though scientists have described the “biological
timetable” of individual worker bees—how they progress from one task to another over
the course of their lives—and how they can abandon or reverse the progression when
necessary, much less is known about how the culture that informs these tasks is
transferred from one generation to the next (Longgood 15, 86-87; Gould and Gould 29-
40). As Longgood points out, the bees that prepare the hive for winter have never seen or
experienced that season before. And, thinking more broadly, the worker assumes each of
her different vocations “without training or prior knowledge” and, just as remarkable, she
is the offspring of “parents who have never performed the chores expected of her, neither
having the organs nor the requisite intelligence for what is required of their offspring”
(89). Rather than attempt to imagine the long course of evolution which could have
selected the genetic coding for such wide-ranging yet precise instincts, Longgood prefers
to revel in his befuddlement. He stresses that we just do not know—that the mechanisms
or intelligence at work are beyond our comprehension.
The unknowability that Longgood associates with honeybees helps excuse errant
theories about their biology. Without any way to discern the truth, writers, including
Virgil, have generated and circulated some interesting myths about honeybees. The
Roman poet, we now know, got a lot wrong about honeybees. He insisted, for example,
that bees could be generated from the decaying carcass of a bull, and provided careful
instructions in the Fourth Georgic for how to carry out this marvel (281-310). In the same
book he wrote about the marvels of their reproduction: “You will also marvel that this
custom has found favour with bees, that they indulge not in conjugal embraces, nor idly
unnerve their bodies in love, or bring forth young with travail, but of themselves gather
their children in their mouths from leaves and sweet herbs” (IV. 206-08). Part of Virgil’s
wonder, then, comes from the bees’ total devotion to labor. Wasting no time on romance
and sex, Virgil imagines that the bees devote themselves entirely to their work.
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The Georgics thus persistently couples marvel to biotic events and agents. As much
as Virgil and his contemporaries knew about the techniques involved in horticulture and
apiculture, the actual mechanisms by which a grafted tree grew or a hive prospered were
shrouded in mystery. Indeed, the degree of uncertainty is made clear by the instructions
and theories (ridiculous by today’s standards) Virgil provided about some aspects of
beekeeping.
Even an incorrect theory, though, illustrates the stance toward working landscapes
that Virgil modeled in The Georgics. A farm was a space for labor, certainly, but it was also
layered in mysteries that astonished and rendered one passive. Even casual observers
would be confronted by something unexpected or something that exceeded their
knowledge and understanding. Encountering the unanticipated and the unexplained, for
Virgil and for us, invites one of two responses. We can fall back on rationality and seek a
theory that explains a mystery. We will also, as Virgil frequently reminds us, be affected
by the surprise of the unknown. Catching us off guard, at the moment it arrives marvel
slips past our rationality and stirs the soul. To marvel—at a swarm of bees or a grafted
pear—carries us out of ourselves. We are perhaps never more fully occupying the present
than in a moment of marvel. It is only in the aftermath of marvel that we contemplate the
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history of events and agents that produced the moment we just occupied. Initially, we do
not take the time to think: we are taken out of time and placed in the now and the right
here.
Conclusion: Marvel as Negative Hubris
Although I have treated epic and biotic triggers for marvel separately above, they
can coalesce. In fact, on the Ohio farm of Louis Bromfield—a Pulitzer-Prize winning
novelist who spent the final decade of his life developing a program of restorative
agriculture 11—the remnants of an epic past created a horticultural curiosity. As Bromfield
explains in the four works of nonfiction he published after World War II about his return
to farming, much of the land he purchased was in a sorry state. Decades of careless
agriculture had eroded much of the topsoil and exhausted most of what did remain. In Out
of the Earth (1948), Bromfield describes his observations of one particular field that
“looked yellow and miserable . . . except in irregularly placed large circular areas
resembling gigantic polka dots” (100). Puzzled by these islands of “rich and rank . . . dark
green” growth in an otherwise poor field, Bromfield searches for an explanation. “By the
end of the summer, after much reflection,” he says,
I hit upon the reason for the handsome, healthy green polka dots. At some time, certainly
generations earlier, perhaps a century, when the forest had been cleared away, the brush
and logs had been piled and burned, and where this had occurred there had been created
great residues of potash . . . so great that they showed up generations later in a field where
otherwise the potash had been used up[.] (101)
Bromfield’s marvel prompts him to reconstruct a timeline linking the pioneers’ epic work
clearing the “wilderness” to his own era. His careful observation of his land lead him to
notice, and puzzle over, the “green polka dots.” Contemplating them further, he imagined
the history of human succession on the land. His marvel transported him back through
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the era of exhaustive agriculture and deposited him at the moment when pioneers cleared
and burned the forests.
Whether epic or biotic or some combination—gigantic bones or germination,
cannonballs or swarming honeybees, or burn-pile shaped green polka dots of lush
growth—what all these triggers for marvel have in common is the response: an altered
state of mind valued by generations of American nature writers. Virgil’s farmer becomes
“awake” in the sense that Thoreau had in mind in Walden. Already “awake enough for
physical labor,” the plowman becomes further roused into, if not “a poetic or divine life,”
then at least “effective intellectual exertion” (Thoreau 134). Similarly shaken out of
themselves, William Longgood and others who have watched bees swarm “uncenter
[their] minds from [themselves]”; they escape from their own anthropocentrism and
11For an introduction to Bromfield, begin with Beeman’s and Pritchard’s chapter in A Green and Permanent
Land.
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perceive a world not ruled by “Lord Man,” but one in which they are “plain member and
citizen” of a vast and ancient biotic network. 12
The experience of georgic marvel, then, functions as a kind of negative hubris that
undermines anthropocentrism by reminding us of the past and by calling our attention to
other actors and agents. As Louis Bromfield contemplated the plants in his field and the
pioneers who cleared, piled, and burned the forests that preceded his farm, he recognized
his place within a succession on the land. He understood—along with others who
experience marvel—that his own role is part of a far broader context and situated at the
end of a long history.
In its challenge to our self-centeredness, georgic marvel parallels the sublime, but
relates to a different land use category and represents a distinct response. First, two of its
best known theorists—Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant—describe the experience of
the sublime as an altered state of mind. 13 Burke, in his 1757 Enquiry, says that the sublime
experience occurs when “the mind is hurried out of itself” (57). According to Philip Shaw,
Kant points to a similar mental failure occurring when the sublime frustrates or shuts
down “our ability to discern boundaries or spatial or temporal limitations” (78). Kant’s
emphasis of an “unboundedness” that overwhelms the mind and Burke’s description of a
mind that has abandoned itself sound, to me, like different ways of describing the altered
states of mind outlined by Thoreau, Muir, Jeffers, and Leopold. And it may be that the
sublime, as described by Burke, Kant, and others, found its way to these American writers.
The sublime was, after all, integral to the nineteenth-century “Nature Writing” of the
British Romantics and the Transcendentalists and has, consequently, continued to inform
writing about the nonhuman world.
Tracing out etymology reveals another connection between the marvel described
by georgic writers and the experience of the sublime. The OED provides astonishment as
a synonym for marvel, and in the former word’s description of a person being transformed
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into a stone, we approach the feeling of being frozen in place—“a momentary inhibition
of the vital forces”—that Kant labeled a first stage of an experience of the sublime (98).
Reading further into the OED definition of marvel, we encounter the words bewilder and
terrify. Burke insisted on the centrality of terror to the sublime; he argued that the “source
of the sublime” is “whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects,
or operates in a manner analogous to terror” (36). Burke goes on to say, however, that the
12 I quote from Robinson Jeffers’s “Carmel Point”, l. 13; John Muir’s A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (69 and
75), and Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” (204). Muir, writing in 1867, repeatedly derides human arrogance
and insists that humankind should not “value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of
creation” and, therefore, should view other life forms as our “earth-born companions and our fellow
mortals” (78-79). Jeffers echoes this sentiment throughout his poetry. He concludes “Carmel Point,” for
example, by insisting that “We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and
ocean that we are made from” (ll. 14-15). Finally, Aldo Leopold delivered his best known articulation of
humankind’s connectedness with the rest of life in “The Land Ethic,” but elsewhere in A Sand County
Almanac he makes a similar point: “men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of
evolution” (109).
13 Rather than enumerating the subtle distinctions between Burke’s and Kant’s theories of the sublime, my
goal is to highlight the basic tenets upon which they agree. Those interested in a more detailed discussion
of Burke’s and Kant’s formulations—as well as the work of their predecessors and successors—should
consult Shaw’s The Sublime.
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sublime can also include delight, so long as “danger or pain” maintain “certain distances”
and do not, therefore, “press too nearly” (36-37)—an idea Kant echoes when he calls the
“feeling of the sublime” a “negative pleasure” because the mind is alternately “attracted
by the object” but also “always repelled” (98). Together, Burke and Kant formulate the
sublime experience as a state of being frozen between fear and attraction, awe and terror.
The role of terror marks some of the schisms between the sublime, Jane Bennett’s
idea of “enchantment,” and georgic marvel—central to the first, involved in the second,
virtually nonexistent in the third. Bennett situates “enchantment” as related to the
sublime. She writes that “[f]ear . . . also plays a role in enchantment” (5). However, that
role must be very minimal given that enchantment is “a state of interactive fascination,
not fall-to-your-knees awe.” Thus, “enchantment” sits between the terrifying impact of a
sublime experience and an encounter with georgic marvel. Returning one last time to the
farmer in Book I of The Georgics, note that fear is completely extraneous from the scene.
He is surprised, certainly, and maybe even experiencing “cognitive dissonance,” but he is
neither threatened nor in danger. The date of publication for Virgil’s Georgics also
indicates that his work represents either a predecessor to Burke and Kant, or a separate
inheritance. The other examples of georgic marvel I discuss make even clearer the
absence of sheer terror. Georgic marvel, then, generally involves intrigue and curiosity
rather than fear. Furthermore, any common ground is largely metaphorical since the
places we associate with the sublime and the georgic mode tend to be distinct. The highest
altitudes of the Alps are not a georgic landscape, and even scholarship on the “Swamp
sublime” places us off the farm. 14
The value of georgic marvel adheres, finally, in the places where it most readily
manifests: those working landscapes that we do not typically associate with the sublime,
and with which twenty-first century Americans struggle to relate. Due in part to theories
of the sublime and the centuries of literature it inspired, more and more of us have been
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coached and coerced towards delighting in wild, rugged, and pristine landscapes. In 2016,
nearly 331 million recreation visits to parks supervised by the National Parks Service set
a new record. 15 There are, however, a whole suite of landscapes—some of them
terrifying—in which we do not delight and that we prefer not to visit (the factory farms
and fields of monocultures that produce the bulk of our calories, pine plantations in the
Southeast, mountaintop removal sites in West Virginia), as well as places we do not regard
as places (the interstate highways that carry us to National Parks, for example). These
agribusiness sites, managed forests, mines, and roadways are, however, among the places
where we need to invest more of our attention, according to a small cadre of ecocritics
and environmental historians. 16 If we deplete and degrade the places we use, National
Parks and Wilderness Areas will not remain protected for long.
The “ordinary” landscapes of our lives are also sites that have attracted attention
from practitioners of affect theory. Writing in 2011, Lauren Berlant describes the
14 See Monique Allewaert’s 2008 article.

15 The National Park Service website indicates that 330,971,689 recreation visits were made in 2016. See
https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm.
16 See the article by Hess, and the essays by White and by Cronon.
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“ordinary as a zone of convergence of many histories” (10). Christine Berberich, Neil

Campbell, and Robert Hudson—who cite Berlant in the introduction to their collection of
essays on affect—refer to the common places where we live and work as a “landscape of
relations” that provides fertile ground for affect: such places foster “the intersection
between ordinary life and extraordinary encounters and exchanges with the world
around us” (10).
In large swaths of the United States, private woodlands are the kind of ordinary
landscapes where extraordinary encounters can occur. I grew up in a rural county where
forested acres outnumbered cleared. One of my first jobs was as a logger’s apprentice.
During this time, my “exchanges with the world” were sometimes quite literal. I would
drip sweat onto the earth; pine resin would coat my skin and splinters and briars would
pierce it. In short, the work was dependably dirty, difficult, and dangerous. It was also
occasionally marvelous. Forests are full of wonders and, fortunately for me, my teacher
was a logger who thought more about what he could leave in the forest than what he could
remove. The trees we felled and skidded and sold were primarily those senescing toward
death. One such tree illustrated the “convergence of many histories” described by Berlant.
The tree, a white oak more than 150 years old, forked into multiple trunks about thirty
feet above the ground. Even after the tree had been felled, it was difficult to tell just where
the trunk divided. My aim was to cut the tree just below the forks, but my first attempt
revealed twin sets of concentric growth rings. Between the two forks, I saw something
unexpected, and it took me several moments to determine what I was seeing. Over the
course of the tree’s life, its forks had created a kind of pocket between them. Apparently
a squirrel or a succession of squirrels had hoarded acorns in the pocket. Over time, leaves
and some of the acorns had rotted into dark, nearly black humus. Other acorns, perhaps
of a more recent vintage, were still intact. When the chain of my saw had cut through this
cache, it created a vivid kaleidoscope of transected acorns held in place by the humus. I
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marveled at the sight. Thinking that this wonder would make a one-of-a-kind table, I
began another cut in the trunk—this one many inches from the first one. When the tip of
my saw neared the rocky ground, I saw sparks fly. I swore, assuming that I had dulled and
perhaps ruined my chain. After finishing the cut, I turned off the saw and inspected the
chain. Here was another marvel: the chain was not dulled. How could this be? My teacher
had a theory. “Could be a bullet,” he said. Rolling the section of log out for a better view,
we spotted a bright metallic shine revealing that my chain had cut through a bullet along
its long axis. Wonder of wonders! We spent minutes discussing the odds. Had I made the
cut a quarter of an inch in either direction, I would have missed the bullet. If the tree had
not grown as it did and collected the acorns, I would have never made the cut. The bullet’s
size indicated that someone fired it from a high-caliber rifle; how did that bullet lodge
thirty feet up in a tree? That bullet and the story of its discovery symbolize the way that
working landscapes are “landscapes of relations.” The interplay of tree and soil, squirrel
and tree, hunter and woods, logger and forest all tangled together to produce affect.
Embracing the idea of georgic marvel could revise the terms of our personal
relationships with private woodlands as well as lawns and backyards, but also has the
potential to yield much larger change. What if we began actively seeking marvel at home?
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Georgic marvel, like Bennett’s “enchantment,” is “a comportment that can be fostered

through deliberate strategies” (4). Pursuing outdoor re-creation within walking distance
from the places we live would elevate the esteem of gardening, horticulture, and forest
management. Thinking about our home ground (however we define it) in georgic terms
would enrich our lives. We would see the land around homes as more than “the grounds”
and more than accents that add “curb appeal”: any patch of earth could become a space
for physical labor that could generate exercise and food. Occasionally encountering
marvel would transform that physical labor from “drudgery” into a potential pathway to
intellectual invigoration, enlightenment, and joy.
Jane Bennett argues that “it is too hard to love a disenchanted world” (12). Part of
the value of enchantment—or wonder or marvel—is that it provides “a fleeting return to
childlike excitement about life” (5). Bennett argues that such moments of joy can “propel
ethics” (4). For her, the formula is simple: “presumptive generosity, as well as the will to
social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence” (12).
Georgic marvel, like enchantment, invites one to revel in living and, if Bennett is correct,
also helps to cultivate ethics. Marveling in even the mundane patches of earth helps us
recognize that every place has an ecology and a history as well as ethical standing. Exactly
what that would mean for the most extreme working landscapes is hard to say. Factory
farms and mountain-top-removal sites that are too terrifying to be sublime also seem
designed to stifle marvel. But for the places situated between protected wilderness and
National Parks on the one hand and the most blasted and desecrated working landscapes
on the other, georgic marvel offers one path towards an affective relationship with the
nonhuman world. Working the earth creates encounters, including marvelous ones that
help us love the world.
Vol 12, No 2
Works Cited
Allewaert, Monique. 2008. “Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of Resistance in the American

Plantation Zone.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, pp. 340-57.
Altherr, Thomas L. 1990. “‘The Country We Have Married’: Wendell Berry and the Georgic
Tradition of Agriculture.” Southern Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 105-15.
Beeman, Randal S. and James A. Pritchard. A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and
Agriculture in the Twentieth Century. University of Kansas Press, 2001.
Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.
Princeton University Press, 2001.
Berberich, Christine, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson. “Introduction: Affective
Landscapes.” Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art, and Everyday Life: Memory, Place,
and the Senses, edited by Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson,
Ashgate, 2015, pp. 1-17.
Bladow, Kyle and Jennifer Ladino. Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment,
Environment. University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
Berlant, Laruen. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
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Bromfield, Louis. Out of the Earth. Harper, 1948.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful, edited by Adam Phillips. 1757. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Cannavo, Peter F. The Working Landscape: Founding, Preservation, and the Politics of Place.
The MIT Press, 2007.
Conlogue, William. Here and There: Reading Pennsylvania’s Working Landscapes. The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon,
Norton. 1996, pp. 69-90.
Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of
Gould, James L. and Carol Grant Gould. The Honey Bee. Scientific American Library, 1988.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press,
2010.
Hess, Scott. “Imagining an Everyday Nature.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment, vol. 17, no. 1, 2010, pp. 85-112.
Jeffers, Robinson. The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, edited by
Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Press, 2003.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by Walter S. Pluhar. 1790. Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford University
Press, 1949.
Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Longgood, William. The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men. Norton, 1985.
Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton University Press, 1985.
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Mannon, Ethan. “Georgic Environmentalism in North of Boston: An Ethic for Economic
Landscapes.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 23, no. 2,
2016, pp. 344-69.
Marshall, Ian. Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail. University
Press of Virginia, 1998.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University
Press, 2002.
Muir, John. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf. 1916. Sierra Club Books, 1991.
O’Brien, Karen. “Imperial Georgic, 1660-1789.” The Country and the City Revisited: England
and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850, edited by Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and
Joseph Ward, Cambridge University Press. 1996, pp. 160-79.
Paludan, Phillip. Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. The University of Tennessee Press,
1981.
Rash, Ron. The World Made Straight. Henry Holt and Company, 2006.
Ray, Janisse. Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River.
The University of Georgia Press, 2011.
Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. Routledge, 2006.
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Slovic, Scott. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility.
University of Nevada Press, 2008.
Svenson, Peter. Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground. Faber and Faber, 1992.
Tallmadge, John. “Toward a Natural History of Reading.” ISLE 7, vol. 1, 2000, pp. 33-45.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. 1854. Penguin, 1983.
Virgil. Eclogues, Georgic. Aeneid I–VI. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. Rev. G. P. Goold.
Loeb Classical Library.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
White, Richard. “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work For a Living?’: Work and
Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William
Cronon, Norton, 1996, pp. 171-85.
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2002.
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Author: Gifford, Terry Title: Contemporary British Georgic Writing
Contemporary British Georgic Writing
Terry Gifford
Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
Universidad de Alicante, Spain
[email protected]
Abstract
Do we need the modish term “eco-georgic” to help us discover the unsentimental, holistic, healing
qualities in the best georgic writing of the Anthropocene? When were georgics not “eco”? Is there a “post-
georgic” in forms of contemporary literature that seem to reject husbandry altogether, such as rewilding
texts? Do such categories serve any purpose to readers and critics in the Anthropocene? This essay argues
that such careful distinctions do, indeed, matter more than ever now as we reconsider our sustainable
options in husbandry, land-management and what sustainability might look like, as it is represented and
explored in our fiction and non-fiction georgic literature in Britain at the present. One might expect
contemporary georgic writing to exemplify the environmental engagement implied in the term “eco-
georgic”. In fact, contemporary georgic can be environmentally radical or apparently indirect in its
implications for sustainability. It remains as diverse, hybrid and composted in the past as Virgil’s original
text. This essay begins by considering definitions, with reference to Virgil’s founding Latin text, begun in the
third decade BCE, the Georgics. It recognises Laura Sayre’s complaint that ecocriticism has neglected georgic
writing, and argues that this is certainly true for contemporary British georgic texts. This essay focuses on
contemporary georgic fiction and non-fiction in relation to Virgil’s founding text. The novels of Cynan Jones,
Tom Bullough, Marie-Elsa Bragg and Tim Pears are discussed and contrasted with one by Melissa Harrison
that might mistakenly be thought of as georgic. Three categories of non-fiction are identified and discussed
with examples: instructional georgic, personal memoir and future-oriented georgic. Consideration of the
latter leads to conclusions about their inevitable overlaps and a final call for a radical mutual agency to
embed animism and enchantment into contemporary georgic writing.
Vol 12, No 2
Keywords: Virgil, eco-georgic, instructional georgic, personal memoir, future-oriented georgic.
Resumen
¿Necesitamos el término de moda "eco-geórgico" para ayudarnos a descubrir las cualidades no

sentimentales, holísticas y curativas en la mejor escritura geórgica del Antropoceno? ¿Cuándo no eran "eco"
las geórgicas? ¿Hay un "post-geórgico" en las formas de literatura contemporánea que parecen rechazar por
completo la agricultura, como los textos de retorno a la vida silvestre? ¿Sirven tales categorías para los
lectores y críticos en el Antropoceno? Este ensayo argumenta que tales distinciones cuidadosas, de hecho,
importan más que nunca ahora que reconsideramos nuestras opciones sostenibles en la agricultura, la
gestión de la tierra y cómo podría ser la sostenibilidad, tal y como está representada y desarrollada en la
literatura de ficción y no ficción en Gran Bretaña en la actualidad. Uno podría esperar que la escritura
geórgica contemporánea ejemplifique el compromiso ambiental implícito en el término "eco-geórgico". De
hecho, la geórgica contemporánea puede ser ambientalmente radical o aparentemente indirecta en sus
implicaciones para la sostenibilidad. Sigue siendo tan diverso, híbrido y compostado en el pasado como lo
es el texto original de Virgilio. Este ensayo comienza considerando las definiciones, con referencia al texto
fundacional en latín de Virgilio, comenzado en la tercera década a. C., las Geórgicas. Reconoce la queja de
Laura Sayre de que la ecocrítica ha descuidado la escritura geórgica, y argumenta que esto es
indisputablemente cierto para los textos geórgicos británicos contemporáneos. Este ensayo se centra en la
ficción contemporánea y la no ficción en relación con el texto fundacional de Virgilio. Las novelas de Cynan
Jones, Tom Bullough, Marie-Elsa Bragg y Tim Pears se analizan y contrastan con una de Melissa Harrison
que erróneamente podría considerarse como geórgica. Tres categorías de no ficción se identifican y son
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analizadas con ejemplos: geórgico instructivo, memorias personales y geórgico orientado al futuro. La
consideración de estos últimos lleva a conclusiones sobre sus inevitables superposiciones y a un
llamamiento final a una agencia mutua radical para integrar el animismo y el encantamiento en la escritura
contemporánea.
Palabras clave: Virgilio, eco-geórgico, geórgico instructivo, memorias personales, geórgico orientado al
futuro.
Definitions
One of Seamus Heaney’s late essays was titled “Eclogues ‘In Extremis’: On the
Staying Power of Pastoral” (2003). The Northern Irish poet saw himself as continuing a
tradition of pastoral that began in the fourth decade BCE with Virgil’s Eclogues, and a
growing body of Irish literary scholarship confirms that Heaney’s poetic innovations form
a part of that tradition (Burris, Pastoral Tradition; Fawley 138-148; O’Donoghue 111-119;
Potts 45-74). But Heaney might just as well have written an essay with the title “On the
Staying Power of Georgics”, a different Virgilian tradition begun in the third decade BCE
with the Georgics, with which he was also well acquainted, and to which he could lay equal
claim as a contributor. The teaching of Latin in schools persisted longer in Ireland than in
the grammar schools of England, and Virgil’s Georgics has always been a text popular with
teachers, partly because of both its detailed familiarity with agricultural practices, and its
engagement with the unpredictability of the natural environment. In the Georgics hard
work is a virtue, but so is an alertness to nature and an adaptability in working with it
sustainably. Michael Longley, Bernard O’Donoghue and Peter Fallon have outlived Heaney
as the last generation of Irish poets to have been schooled in Latin. When Heaney’s friend
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and sometime publisher at The Gallery Press, Peter Fallon, made a new translation of the
Georgics (2004), Heaney immediately made a point of endorsing Fallon’s authenticity as
“a poet who has not only lived on a farm but has done the work of a farmer” (“Glory of the
world”). In georgic literature, authenticity matters, and the potential consequence of
inaccuracy or inattention is that farmers and their consumers go hungry. “It is this
combination of truth to the words Virgil wrote, natural vernacular speech and a general
at-homeness on the land that make Fallon’s an inspired translation,” Heaney wrote in his
review for The Irish Times (“Glory of the World”). For Heaney, the challenge that Virgil set
himself to explore poetically, that of working in harmony with the land, was significant
because it constituted a necessary way of recovering from the discord of civil war in
Virgil’s Italy. The parallel for Heaney with the discord in the North of Ireland hardly needs
pointing out. The conclusion of Heaney’s review suggests that the qualities of Virgil’s
Georgics he enumerates resound with contemporary relevance:
Unsentimental, holistic, as careful of the gods in the heavens as of the Italian ground, it was
Virgil's dream of how his hurt country might start to heal. After two millennia of technical
improvements in agriculture and no improvements whatever in the war-mongering
activities of the species, it doesn’t sound old. (“Glory of the world”)
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Heaney’s recognition of the continuing relevance of the Georgics here is double-edged.

Our war against each other and the soil (“technical improvements” we now know to have
warred against ecology) continues. We thus need, more than ever, Virgil’s “dream” of
healing, although it might be only a dream. So, if this is true, does the modish term “eco-
georgic” help us rediscover those “unsentimental”, “holistic”, “healing qualities” as we
read georgic writing in the Anthropocene? When were georgics not “eco”? Are there
“uneco-georgics”? Indeed, is there a “post-georgic” in some forms of contemporary
literature about husbandry, such as rewilding texts? Has an uneasy distinction between
georgic and pastoral collapsed in contemporary rural writing? Has the recognition of the
“post-pastoral” rendered “eco-georgic” redundant? Do such categories serve any purpose
to readers and critics in the Anthropocene? My argument in this essay is that such careful
distinctions do, indeed, matter as we reconsider the sustainability of our options in
husbandry and land-management, as that husbandry is represented and explored in our
poetry, fiction and non-fiction literature. One might expect contemporary georgic writing
to exemplify the environmental engagement implied in the term “eco-georgic”. In fact,
contemporary georgic can be environmentally radical or apparently indirect in its
implications for sustainability. It remains as diverse, hybrid and caught between past
traditions and present dilemmas as Virgil’s original text.
David Fairer introduced the term “eco-georgic” in order to make a case for the kind
of eighteenth century georgic that British ecocritics had conspicuously ignored in favour
of the Romantic pastoral discussed in Jonathan Bate’s pioneering book Romantic Ecology:
Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991). Inadvertently inviting the same
criticism of his own new term, Fairer wrote: “‘Green Romanticism’ seems almost
tautological” (“Where fuming trees” 203). In the course of his argument Fairer establishes
a useful distinction between pastoral myth and georgic authenticity: “The spiritual
dynamic of Romantic ecocriticism, founded on pastoral ideals, remains inspirational; but
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georgic’s grappling with the possible death of Nature and the breakdown of its infinitely
various life-sustaining systems, has something to contribute too” (“Where fuming trees”
214). Elsewhere Fairer has expressed that distinction in more stark terms:
In being a stereotype, pastoral could be inverted, turned round, parodied and played with;
but in order for all this to work it had to remain a stereotype. Georgic, on the other hand,
was at home with notions of growth, development, variety, digression, and mixture, and
had a natural tendency to absorb the old into the new, and find fresh directions. Pastoral’s
limitations and georgic’s capaciousness, were, in other words, equally fruitful; but they
marked out different kinds of poetry. (English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 80)
One could argue with the reductiveness of “stereotype” here and with pastoral
conventions as “limitations,” but the combination of direct, practical “grappling” with
nature’s unpredictability and the capacity for language and forms to represent adaption
with “capaciousness” offers a definition of georgic to take forward into a reading of
contemporary literature concerned with husbandry. There is more to be said about
georgic’s relationship with pastoral (see Gifford Pastoral and Gifford 2022 forthcoming),
but for present purposes the central feature of georgic is its practical dialogue with the
organic – “where nature is drawn into culture and culture leaks into nature” as Paul Evans
put it recently (“Country Diary”).
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In reading contemporary georgic it will be important to recognise the genre’s own

literary “variety, digression and mixture” and its “capaciousness” in creating hybridity
that were a feature of Virgil’s foundational text. This is evident in the different historical
approaches to the Georgics as a didactic genre, for example, or as an allegorical one, or as
one concerned with labour of any kind, or with any kind of rural activity, such as
“piscatorial georgic.” Virgil’s Book Four begins with didactics about the siting of bee hives
before idealising their landscape setting. This develops into a political allegory about how
to deal with rival leaders, which later becomes explicit commentary on the
“commonwealth” of bees, and ends with a formal short epic, an aition, explaining the
origin of the custom for dealing with loss, through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Juan
Christian Pellicer has noted six examples of “errors” in the Georgics, one of which,
advocating the spontaneous creation of bees from the carcass of a young bullock,
illustrates the importance of making distinctions (“Georgic as Genre”). As a didactic
passage it is clearly in error, but as an allegory of sweetness emerging from death it is still
present on Tate and Lyle syrup bottles (now Abram Lyle and Sons) which carry the dead
lion and bees icon, with the endorsement of a Biblical text. This image of life emerging
from death is an ancient symbol recognised by Simon Armitage, in Still (2016), who used
it as his final passage of translations from the Georgics in response to photographs of the
Somme Battlefield.
Armitage prefers to call his versions of the Georgics “manipulations” (“Reading”),
but his work follows the five major new translations which Laura Sayre lists as having
been published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Whilst recognising a
renewed publishing interest in the Georgics, Sayre complains that ecocriticism has
neglected georgic writing, and this is certainly true for contemporary georgic texts. “The
fact that the Georgics and the georgic continue to be so frequently overlooked suggests
the stubborn narrowness of our understanding of the human-environment dilemma,”
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Sayre writes in her essay, “Ecocritical Lessons from the History of Virgil’s Georgics in
Translation” (in Christopher Schliephake’s Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of
Antiquity 194). Such narrowness might be exemplified by the attention given to British
New Nature Writing, attention that often fails to recognise the extent to which it also
focuses on the georgic. This observation echoes Mark Cocker’s argument, in Our Place:
Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? (2018), that whilst Britain has seen a
rise in interest in wildlife organisations and nature reserves, it has allowed industrial
agriculture to denature the countryside upon which wildlife depends. Never before have
bees and other pollinators, for example, been under such threat, and their appearance in
our literature more significant (Rigby 110). Suddenly, Virgil’s Georgics seem more
relevant than ever; at least one of the contemporary writers under consideration in this
essay actually consults Virgil’s Georgics for advice.
Fiction
“So the story goes […]”. With this phrase, towards the end of Book Four, Virgil
begins a mythic narrative which, in turn, contains another mythic narrative as the story
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of Aristaeus leads into the Orpheus story. In Book Four what begins as advice on bee-
keeping turns into an allegory for social choices as the community of bees comes to
represent human social and political dramas. But contemporary fictional narratives have
rarely been read through the frame of their georgic challenges, that is the choices and
dilemmas of farming, as creating and reflecting the human dramas associated with this
way of life. David Fairer’s term was intended to make a claim for eighteenth century
georgic, but would the reading of contemporary fiction be enhanced, extended and
enriched by the term “eco-georgic”? Five contemporary novels stand out as conspicuously
georgic in their detailed concern with what Laura Sayre calls “the human-environment
dilemma” (194) of how to relate to land and animals. Two are set in Wales, one tracing a
single day, and the other seventy years of human engagement with land, animals, and
occasionally bees. Close attention to these texts might demonstrate how a good georgic
novel integrates, inseparably, tensions of concern for land, animals and humans.
Cynan Jones’ The Long Dry (2006) charts a day during which a pregnant cow
wanders off and has to be found, an event that raises, in the farming family, memories and
anxieties which are neglected but unavoidable. The prose immediately establishes a
knowing and poetic quality, despite its simplicity, in describing the family’s first moving
into the farmhouse: “When the house started to live around its new people, things seemed
to find a more comfortable place for themselves – like earth settling – haphazard and
somehow right, like the mixture of things in a hedge” (4). The farmer, Gareth, as he
searches his fields for the cow, muses on his wife’s anxiety about ageing, her feeling that
her body is no longer attractive to him, and the aftereffects of her miscarriages. “When,
years later, they found that Gareth had chlamydia and this was why she lost the babies –
it had transferred in fluids from handling the sheep – Gareth was relieved. It fell on him
[…] After losing the babies, she felt every death” (49). Which is why, before he sets out on
his search, Gareth disposes of a stillborn calf down an old well. The author thus
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demonstrates his georgic authenticity on the third page, dead farm animals having been
traditionally disposed of cheaply and conveniently by hiding them in old wells, old shafts,
or limestone “slockers” (swallets) in the Mendips Hills of England. Cumbrian sheep farmer
and author James Rebanks calls such a place the farm’s “dead hole” (194).
The farming rhythms of lows and highs, of death and beauty, of depression and
insight, continue through the novel as the cow wanders aimlessly into a bog and the vet
arrives to put down the old dog, Curly, whilst the mother sleeps off a headache and only
the little girl is in the yard to watch the vet. Gareth “believed in dignity though, that this
was a right in life not just human. He knew that having Curly put down was about dignity”
(87). Gareth hears his son driving the Transit back to the farm after reluctantly doing a
job. “Looking out over the sea he thinks of his son; he does not want to farm, but he’ll know
one day what a wonderful place this is” (43). The vet, after he arrived, was thinking, with
wonder, about the remarkable life of a bee searching purposefully around a corner of the
yard. There is a passage in this novel about beetles eating fly maggots in a dead mole the
cat has brought in. These passages contribute to the sense of the rhythms of what the
mother in her sleep calls “the farm turning,” which eases her pain (88). But what lends
Gareth dignity is his belief in caring: “He thinks, if we have tragedy then we have to face
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care” (78). Indeed, he goes on to think about his farming family, “That perhaps a crisis
would cure them too – would push away the tiny problems that were damaging them like
splinters” (78). The problem is that attempts to express that love and care by both himself
and his wife get misunderstood and end in another row. However, the cow is found and
brought back by a neighbour to whom Gareth has generously lent some land, and as
Gareth is burying the dog, it finally begins to rain.
The complex overlapping matrix of concerns and caring in farming family life is
explored with great subtlety in spite of the book’s spare prose, or perhaps most poignantly
because of its spare prose. Published ten years later, the more loquacious prose of Tom
Bullough’s Addlands (2016) achieves an equally moving account of a farming family’s
various responses and adjustments to new technologies that overtake the traditions
which have come to be associated with important values. At the centre of this Welsh
farming family is the mother, Etty, who negotiates these tensions with an eye to the long-
term survival of the farm. Bullough savours the vernacular formulations of English spoken
by the Welsh and further inflected by their farming vocabulary. (This linguistic humour
extends to Bullough’s mentioning a poetry collection, The Drought, which some unnamed
critic has pompously described as “one of the formative books in post-pastoral poetry”
(248). It seems likely that Bullough is referencing the original definition of “post-pastoral”
in Gifford, Pastoral, 167-200.) The chapters of Addlands are titled by dates, beginning in
1941, with Idris reluctantly horse-ploughing meadowland for the war effort and for
wartime payments, his defiance expressed by doing it well, unlike his neighbours’ more
desultory compliance. In 2001, with the farm near bankruptcy, Etty decides to infect the
farm’s own flock with foot-and-mouth in order to get compensation payments. By 2011,
with the land sold, Etty is pleased that her grandson, after he has travelled the world post-
university as a computer programmer, has returned to live in the run-down cottage that
he now owns, the place that was occasionally lived in for “his grandfather’s weekends”
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(283), where the farming family could never have afforded to have electricity installed. “It
brought Etty a warm, enveloping pleasure to think that, after everywhere he had been,
Cefin should choose to come and live here” (283). Bullough’s novel suggests that it takes
generations of hard work to build deep family ties to place. But the irony is that the
grandson will not be farming in this place where he grew up, but living from the internet.
This hard work is detailed in Marie-Elsa Bragg’s novel Towards Mellbreak (2017)
in which a Cumbrian sheep farmer is reluctant to accept that the very work on the land he
loves is ultimately responsible for breaking him. Again, change produces its
uncomfortable challenges, one of which concerns chemical pesticides having a tragic
effect on sheep farmers. In this novel the church plays a role in the rhythms of the year
and in connecting with the wider world through missionary work, which is no surprise
since the author, who is the daughter of the Cumbrian novelist and broadcaster, Melvin
Bragg, is a Duty Chaplain at Westminster Abbey. By contrast, Jim Crace’s novel Harvest
(2013) has a distinctly pagan atmosphere and an allegorical quality. It is about the
historical period when enclosure brought in the sheep and dispossessed the peasant
population. But Crace wants this novel to be read as engaging with contemporary
concerns rather than as a historical novel, “Which is the problem when you write books
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that are, in your mind anyway, metaphors” (“Interview”). However, Crace’s georgic
specificity and knowledge of the land itself constructs this novel less as political metaphor
than as agricultural allegory, bringing to mind, for example, the selling off of allotments
for housing developments, or the post-war decimation of neighbourly small mixed farms
for the large-scale industrial monocultures of the twenty-first century. Rob Nixon,
reviewing the novel for The New York Times, read the novel as an instance of his notion of
“slow violence”: “the new enclosures brought about by merciless globalization and the
widening chasm between the mega-wealthy and the dispossessed” (8 February 2013). Of
course, this does describe what has happened to farming in Britain, as elsewhere in the
world, and only serves to demonstrate the reach that can be achieved by a contemporary
georgic allegorical novel such as Harvest.
The first of the two novels discussed so far—The Long Dry and Addlands—carry
dust-jacket endorsements from Tim Pears, which suggests something of his own
reputation as a writer of contemporary rural fiction. Pears grew up on the edge of
Dartmoor and first worked as a farm labourer before writing eight rural novels, and then
beginning the first of what have since been promoted as “The West Country Trilogy”: The
Horseman (2017), The Wanderers (2018) and The Redeemed (2019). These are
fastidiously georgic novels, detailing working practices and vocabulary and insistently
claiming authenticity. The first novel opens in 1911, when the central character, Leo, is
aged twelve. His father is a carter, working with horses, and as the novel begins Leo is
breaking a colt for his father, watched by Miss Charlotte, known as Lottie, who is the
Master’s young daughter. Their shared love of horses brings Leo and Lottie together, but
class dominates their relationship as it is traced through the trilogy up until 1929. From
the opening page the period details and the use of language earnestly make their mark on
the reader, as here, where the smith fixes a metal tyre on a new wheel for a waggon. “The
stocks” of the waggon, we are told, “had been shaped from oak logs and rested in the
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seasoning chamber five years. The wheels and their parts were carved from oak and
stored another three. The dates were nicked in the wood by the wheelwright next-door”
(1).
Georgic research, as indicated Pears’ Acknowledgements, was never more
transparent, and the emphasis on such detail might be considered overwhelming, even
nostalgic, by some readers. But one of the ways Pears avoids sentimentality is to focus on
simple descriptions of action rather than feeling. It helps that Leo is taciturn (nor does he
smile much). Thus, the narrative is plot-led, with Leo learning to observe the world
around him to find his place in it. But actually he is displaced, as the young horseman of
the first book turns into the wanderer of the second. Lottie lives a parallel life as the
daughter of Lord Prideaux until, in the third book, when Leo has survived the First World
War and Lottie is now a vet’s assistant, they return together to a changed rural life. Lottie
is the now manager of her father’s estate, and uses a motorcycle to get around it, whilst
Leo rents a small plot of land nearby, and works the horses for his landowner until a
tractor arrives. They are eventually reconciled through Leo’s patience and persistence in
curing Lottie’s horse of its violent fear of the dark. Then, together they use contact with
horses as therapy for disturbed people of all ages. In the Epilogue an elderly Leo is turning
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a bowl of wood for their granddaughter. This reads like an instruction manual for wood
turning, including the qualities of different kinds of wood, and in the trilogy’s final pages
we are treated to an example of what can only be called georgic fastidiousness: “Leo folded
over a sheet of one-hundred-and-eighty-grit sandpaper and smoothed the bowl further,
then did so again with a two-hundred-and-forty-grit paper, finely abrading the wood still
more” (376). Only in the final paragraph of the trilogy is Pears tempted into explicit
georgic metaphor, as Leo’s use of the turning lathe rather clumsily becomes the turning
of horses in the dust as a metaphor for human life: “hooves prancing, bodies steaming in
the morning light, their muscled flanks rippling, revelling in their freedom” (377).
Some of the potential limitations of georgic fiction are revealed by a comparison of
Tim Pears’ trilogy with a non-georgic rural novel set in East Anglia in the period following
the end of Pears’ final book. Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley (2018) is narrated by
the adolescent Edie Mather, born just after the First World War to a farming family. She is
befriended by a visitor to the village from London, Constance FitzAllen. Constance is
collecting material for an article on the traditional rural way of life, “country ways:
folklore, cottage crafts, dialect words, recipes – that kind of thing” (20), rather than
agricultural work practices. Certainly Edie is aware of georgic practices; her discourse on
a good barley crop, “it is so exact in its requirements” (41), suggest this, together with her
explicit reflection on the need for husbandry in the case of the neighbouring Hullet
family’s unmown meadow: “Hullets was proof that nature needed husbandry: that if it
wasn’t put to work, it went to ruin” (22). But Harrison’s novel is not about work in the
sense that Pears’ characters express themselves through their attention to the details of
their work. Constance’s interests give Harrison’s novel a pastoral focus on passing
traditions, alive and just remembered in 1933. Despite Constance’s rejection of rural
nostalgia, saying that “the English are already far too much in love with the past”, she
wants to paradoxically “remake the country entirely” based upon those traditions in order
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to “set it back on the right course” (21). Constance’s view of georgic activity tends towards
a mode of pastoral that pretends to reject nostalgia whilst actually idealising traditional
practices. In Harrison’s exposure of this the author is clearly taking a different stance. All
Among the Barley is a post-pastoral novel in that the ultimate revelation that Constance is
an activist for a rural fascist group called the Order of English Yeomanry demonstrates
one of the dangers of pastoral idealisation of traditional ruralism. This revelation may
have come as a shock to readers who have empathised with Edie’s interest in her
supportive friend, the ironically named Constance.
Such complications in a richly textured rural historical novel offer more to the
reader than Pears’ rather limited plot-driven trilogy. Harrison’s prose is more lyrical,
expressive of emotion, and her characters are more self-aware of their relationships. The
reader has actually been given accumulating evidence of Constance’s political agenda
which finally invites reflection on the uses of georgic activity for pastoral-political
purposes. Edie’s intelligent curiosity, her sincerity and vulnerability, her slight mental
instability, draw the reader with lyrical prose into what might have appeared to be a
pastoral novel of the 1930s. The novel’s ending offers a final sad contradiction to any such
assumptions. A fire in the hayricks – which may have been started by her father to pay off
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the debts of the farm with insurance money – is remembered by the seventy-year old Edie,
who seems to have been institutionalised since that trauma. Georgic fiction such as that
of Jones and Bullough can achieve the complexities and ironies of Harrison’s work if it is
not overwhelmed by the very detail and narrative context that makes it georgic in the first
place. Indeed, Dominic Head argues that immersion in “a sustained focus on farming”
would have given readers the impression that Harrison endorsed Constance’s idealisation
of farming, compromising her ability to finally achieve “bringing them up short” (“The
Farming Community Revisited”). But the evidence of Jones’ and Bullough’s novels
demonstrates that georgic detail need not necessarily lead to idealisation and can just as
easily be regarded as anti-pastoral in effect. Jennifer Ladino has argued for a more
nuanced reading of nostalgia that allows it sometimes to represent continuity with values
that deserve defending in the present, suggested by what might be called “progressive
nostalgia” (13). Idealised nostalgia is always a danger in georgic writing, as Harrison’s
novel points out, but it is rarely present in contemporary georgic non-fiction, partly
because it is often anchored in a culture of continuity. What does seem clear is that a
discussion of the subtleties of these narratives and their positioning between georgic
authenticity and pastoral idealisation would hardly have been clarified by recourse to the
term “eco-georgic”.
Non-Fiction
There are at least three kinds of contemporary georgic non-fiction writing,

although there is some degree of overlap between them, and their literary quality may be
variable. They range from traditional instructional georgic to the georgic of personal
memoir, to a future-oriented georgic that might appear to run counter to husbandry
altogether. There is no reason why these three categories cannot also be found in georgic
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poetry and fiction, but in georgic non-fiction they are more prominent in their
distinctiveness, which, in turn, enables one to observe aspects of their hybridity. Personal
memoir may naturally lead to future-oriented georgic, as in the urban bee-keeping of
Helen Jukes. In the case of James Rebanks and Isabella Tree, personal memoir and future-
oriented georgic, respectively, each strongly refer back to traditionally learned practices
that might have appeared in instructional georgic writing.
In the first category, accounts of the georgic year for gardeners and agriculturalists
continue a tradition that includes sixteenth century herbalists and eighteenth century
books of the seasons. The seasonally-focussed The River Cottage Year (2003), by cook
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, might be taken as representative of the cottage garden
strand of georgic gardening books that remain as popular as ever in the twenty-first
century, especially in a time of home-focussed activity during a pandemic. The BBC TV
programme Countryfile, with an average audience of six million viewers, is the UK’s most
popular weekly factual series. Each week it features an update from the Cotswold farmer
Adam Henson, whose book Countryfile: Adam’s Farm: My Life on the Land (2011), is one
of his six books about aspects of his life on an extensive mixed farm. This is a personalised,
readable book which gives a strong sense of the way modern mixed farming is dominated
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by market prices and changes in regulation. Practicalities dominate, rather than personal
family details, bar Henson’s celebration of his father’s passion, inherited by his son, for
saving rare breeds and training sheepdogs.
A much more troubled tone dominates John Connell’s The Cow Book: A Story of Life
on a Family Farm (2018), a georgic memoir that is both an immediate record and an
account of the historical role of the cow in human culture. It is a hybrid of history and
myth coupled with an account of present tensions between father and son, raising cows
in County Longford, two hours from Dublin. It opens with the author, twenty-nine years
old and returned from two failed careers in Canada and Australia, delivering a calf for the
first time alone on his family farm, needing to prove himself to his father, and to himself.
The uncertain masculinities of son and father, in their obstinacy and their recurrent anger,
are a theme of the narrative. As a failed emigrant Connell’s musings on the place of the
cow in world history consider its role in changing human diet and motivating migration,
whilst in the present he consults the world-wide web on symptoms of cow disease.
Meanwhile his mother runs a Montessori play-school on the farm for parents who
commute to Dublin, and further in the background sits his grandmother, the last woman
in Ireland to receive the IRA widow’s war pension. Layers of history, as in the Georgics,
have a presence in the contemporary tensions of this Irish farming family. Connell came
home to write a novel, but, drawn into earning his keep as a cattle farmer, produced a
richly georgic hybrid of a book.
There are no uncertain masculinities in the macho and rather combative memoir
of Cumbrian sheep farmer James Rebanks. He opens his book, The Shepherd’s Life (2015),
by delighting in characterising his school life as attempting to reduce teachers to tears.
“One maths lesson was improved for me by a fist-fight between a pupil and the teacher”
(xiii). Without regret, or further comment, he writes, “One boy who we bullied killed
himself a few years later in his car” (xiii). He models himself on his father and grandfather
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who seek the respect of other sheep farmers. Of his grandfather, Rebanks declares
without subtlety, “until his dying day, I thought the sun shone out of his backside” (3). But
by the time he is twenty his disagreements with his father could turn violent: “On odd
occasions we were dragged off each other, fists flying” (133). Actual shepherding, which
is described in such loving georgic detail in the first half of the book, has become work
over which he ultimately has little “control” when his father inherits the farm and has
become his “boss”. Adult education for A-levels gives him options and “something that I
could control” (137). A History degree at Oxford is followed by work experience in a
magazine’s London office, from the windows of which nothing green can be seen. Rebanks
returns to the family farm, which he had never really left, Oxford terms being only eight
weeks long, where he realises that making judgements about breeding sheep “was more
intellectually challenging than anything I had done [at Oxford]” (157). His conclusion
exemplifies the rebarbative case this book is making for the “nobodies” (6) who work the
landscape of the Lake District: “Shepherds are not thick. We are tuned to a different
channel” (158).
Rebanks provides plenty of evidence for the way shepherds’ knowledge and
judgements are tuned to their fields and fells. “Grass is everything. We see a thousand
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shades of green, like the Inuit sees different kinds of snow” (226). During lambing time,
with sheep needing attention over a wide area, Rebanks must prioritise their needs: “I
have a mental map of the sheep lambing at different places, and when I need to check
again on each of them. It is like having a series of egg-timers in my brain for a number of
ewes around the farm at different stages of giving birth” (250). This writing is graphic and
imaginative in conveying a mode of working with a landscape and its challenges. Rebanks
argues that losing such depth of knowledge, judgement and practices, especially in the
face of the uncertainties of climate change, would be foolish. “It took traditional
communities often thousands of years to learn by trial and error how to live and farm
within the constraints of tough environments like ours” (228). Here Rebanks is speaking
from the perspective of the part-time job he eventually found after Oxford as a farming
adviser to UNESCO which takes him to “historic landscapes” (228) around the world that
face similar challenges to his own. At the same time he has grown a family of his own and
the love of land that permeates the first half of the book extends to his father and his own
wife and children towards the end of the book, which has evolved into a complex georgic
text graphically representing a particular British rural culture, even if it is one which does
not actually feed his family fully. Rebanks’ life as a shepherd is only made possible by
Rebanks Consulting Ltd.
Perhaps there could be no greater contrast with The Shepherd’s Life than Helen
Jukes’ A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees (2018). Lacking in self-
confidence, entering her thirties, and frustrated by office work, temporary addresses and
no sign of a love-life, Jukes decides to keep bees in the garden of the terraced house in
Oxford that she has just moved into to share with her friend, Becky. This memoir is about
learning urban bee-keeping, but it is also an understated narrative about gaining trust and
overcoming vulnerability in relationships, including, ultimately, in love. At every tentative
stage of learning about honeybees and their husbandry, there is a quietly growing
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confidence in her relationship with Luke, her bee-keeping mentor who lives in London.
Indeed, the whole book is about learning through relationships: “beekeeping is about
more than gaining proximity to a hive: it’s about entering into a relationship with a colony”
(33). The therapeutic aspects of this, as propounded by the British Beekeeping
Association, are recognised by Jukes: “It seems you can’t get anywhere near bees without
some mention of healing” (33). But Jukes is full of uncertainties. She actually consults and
quotes the Georgics Book Four on the siting of her hive, although “Virgil doesn’t have much
to say about terraced houses or rush-hour traffic” (31).
The research is handled lightly and always has implications for Jukes’ own
thoughts and practices. She is in London for research and invites friends round for a meal,
none of whom can make it, so she resorts to inviting a friend of a friend she’s not met who
she thinks is a beekeeper. Pat turns out not to be one. But his bones close to his skin
reminds her of “the brittle chitin of bee wings” (194). It is an observation made in passing
and he fades from the narrative until Jukes visits him in London, wanting to tell him
“what’s been happening with the bees. But I don’t tell him about the bees just then. I tell
him I want to kiss him” (232). In the pause that follows this she is “immensely
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uncomfortable” (232). So the honey harvest at the end of the year is accompanied by
another kind of emotional harvest. Only on the final page of the book is this reflected upon:
How to shake the feeling I have when I look at him sometimes that he is not separate from
the hive? That through this experience of beekeeping, of learning about and listening to the
colony, I might have called something up – might have begun to articulate and name a
capacity I was missing, a connection I needed? (282)
Jukes calls this “a particular kind of sensitivity, a quality of attention” (282) and it is what
the memoir mode of contemporary georgic writing at its best can evoke when inner
nature grows through the husbandry of outer nature.
A third mode of contemporary georgic writing might be called “radically future-
oriented georgic”, and it is named in James Rebanks’ list of threats to small family farms
suggesting “that we, small farmers, were yesterday’s people; the future of our landscape
would be tourism and wildlife and trees and wilding” (120). Of course, georgic is always
future-orientated, making its best guesses based upon past experience about what will
work, but a radical break with past practices such as “wilding” is clearly “future-
orientated georgic”. The literature of “regenerative agriculture”, of which Rebanks’ work
might be considered a part, together with books on rewilding, is obviously very much
future-orientated with varying degrees of radicalism. What Rebanks has in mind is George
Monbiot’s provocatively radical book Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of
Rewilding (2015). Trees and wildlife are precisely what Monbiot argues have been
repressed by what he calls the “sheepwrecking” of much of Britain’s uplands, uplands that
he characterises as an ecological “desert” (154-166). Rebanks’ tone may well have been
prompted by Monbiot’s positioning of farmers, as opposed to non-farming rural people,
who make up 95 per cent of the rural population of Wales, for example, as a “small
minority” (166). Whilst acknowledging that “Hill farmers are trying only to survive, and
theirs is a tough, thankless and precarious occupation” (158), Monbiot completely fails to
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comprehend the argument of farmers like Rebanks that this is much more than an
“occupation,” but a deeply georgic commitment to land and family tradition that goes back
thousands of years. Actually, Monbiot’s book is not strictly georgic, but a polemical
intervention in European land-use, farming and conservation debates. His personal
engagements with specific places read like either traditional pastoral moments of
epiphany, as in “I was at that moment transported by the thought […]” (33), or as visions
of a “pure” pastoral ideal without humans: “I pictured trees returning to the bare slopes,
fish and whales returning to the bay” (268).
Of course, Monbiot is right to point out that British farming practices and upland
land-use have, for centuries, resulted in an ecological disaster that has contributed to
what has been recognised by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015) as the sixth extinction. That this
has been intensified in Britain by contemporary forms of husbandry has been
demonstrated by Mark Cocker in Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too
Late? (2018), by Ian Newton in Farming and Birds (2017), and in relation to the husbandry
required for the monoculture of grouse shooting on upland moors by Mark Avery’s
Inglorious: Conflict in the Uplands (2015). The book which offers a georgic response to
these debates is Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018).
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Whilst Monbiot dreams of reintroducing wolves, elk and even elephants, with no georgic
strategies for new stages of human co-occupation, in 2001 Isabella Tree and her husband
Charlie Burrell simply wanted to abandon intensive agriculture on their unprofitable
mixed farm on the Knepp Estate in West Sussex and initially see what reintroduced itself.
Whilst Monbiot’s book is in the idealised pastoral mode, Tree’s is georgic in its practical
compromises. Although her book is titled Wilding, Tree herself uses the term “rewilding”
from the beginning, as in, “When we began rewilding our estate seventeen years ago […]”
(9), whilst recognising that it is a “contentious word” for neighbouring farmers (97). 1
Charlie Burrell is a trustee of the organisation Monbiot established in 2015, Rewilding
Britain. The second of this organisation’s six aims places an emphasis on the role of
humans: “Rewilding can empower rural communities to diversify their economies, and
plan for a future with new opportunities and minimal reliance on grants and subsidies”
(Rewilding Britain). Tree’s story of the decisions taken on the Knepp Estate demonstrates
that rewilding is husbandry, one form of what are known as “nature-based economies.”
Apart from wildlife tourism, Rewilding Britain suggests that there are two further forms
of income for such economies: “i) sustainable hunting and fishing, forestry, and the
harvesting of wild natural products in buffer areas and ii) payments for ecosystem
services (e.g. for peatland restoration, woodland regeneration, flood mitigation and
carbon sequestration).” Some of these activities require skills that Virgil would recognise,
although “eco-tourism” safari trips might have confused him.
The basis of Knepp’s change of land management was to rediscover ancient georgic
knowledge that was thought to have been largely lost in the British countryside. The first
was that a mix of herbivores is mutually beneficial, as different feeding habits by different
animals provide different grazing niches for different kinds of mouths: “facilitation
grazing” (159). The second was that, since this prevented closed-canopy tree cover, wood
pasture is created which is the most species-rich form of habitat. Introducing a mixture of
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free-roaming wild ponies, pigs, fallow deer and old English longhorn cattle provided for
the dynamic of facilitation grazing. One of the striking georgic qualities of Tree’s book is
the way nature and context forced her to compromise what she thought of as her ideal
practices. Even on a large estate, some free-roaming had to be curtailed, and not just to
preserve the polo pitch(!). If some income was to be derived from “the harvesting of wild
natural products” in the form of free-range beef, DEFRA required calves to be tagged after
birth. But knowing exactly where on the estate a cow had chosen for her birthing spot at
any time of year, and exactly how many were calving at any one time, led to the bulls being
given access to the cows at restricted times of year so that a calving period was created to
facilitate tagging. The very choice of the breed of cattle to be longhorns, that tend to be
more docile, was a consequence of the estate having rights of way across it, and the need
to avoid confrontations between dog-walkers and cattle.
What has become well-known about this project is that the habitat that emerged
provided unexpected homes for purple emperor butterflies, nightingales, turtle doves and
twenty-three species of dung beetles in a single cow pat (114). It has also enabled several
1 See Fenton for a rather different Scottish view on rewilding.
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reintroductions, the latest of which is the first successful breeding by wild white storks in
Britain since the English civil war. This challenging form of husbandry (the storks ignored
platforms provided for them and evaded cameras put up at their previous year’s
unsuccessful nest) only increases the potential income from Knepp’s wildlife safaris and
tourism business. Isabella Tree documents all this in her book with a grace that can verge
on idealised pastoral. In the final paragraph of her chapter on the turtle dove, which was
nearly shot to extinction, Tree might be forgiven for a lyrical reflection on its call: “The
gentle mournfulness of its call seemed to plead for a change of heart. A lament from the
wild. An unrequited love song. A swansong” (208). But she also offers a plea for a return
to ancient knowledge in what amounts to her proposal for a future georgic: “Rather than
redesign the future, we could heed the accumulated wisdom of the past. We could eat less
meat, and return to traditional methods of rearing animals” (252).
This is clearly not “post-georgic” since it is actually a form of husbandry that, whilst
making the necessary compromises demanded by its contemporary British context,
returns to a grazing regime that Virgil describes in the Georgics. For the same reason it
would be a distortion of these traditions to categorise Wilding as a work of “eco-georgic”,
despite the way that the book has itself drawn visitors to the estate for what some would
call “eco-tourism”. Wildlife tourism is a by-product of the future-oriented georgic work of
managing rewilded land. What Wilding does is to invite speculation on how future-
oriented georgic writing might add new dimensions to contemporary georgic fiction and
non-fiction by rediscovering ancient traditions of human relations with land, sea,
creatures, plants and weather. For example, maybe what is needed for a future-oriented
georgic is a kind of radical twenty-first century animism to embed enchantment into
contemporary georgic writing (see Deer 2021). James Rebanks knows the personality of
each of his sheep and their modes of agency. He would argue that this is not a “new-age”
sensibility, but one developed from georgic knowledge gained by attentive lived
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experience over generations. Monbiot’s “search for enchantment” in his sub-title can be
gained through the new sense of agency that is now being recognised in trees, for example,
as popularised by Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees (2017). As Rebanks and
Tree might argue, some of this has been intuited and handed down by centuries of
traditional knowledge. “Trees know various ways of propagation,” wrote Virgil in
Wilkinson’s translation (77), recognising their agency. In Peter Fallon’s Irish farmer’s
translation, Virgil exhorts his readers, “So, come on, countrymen, and learn the character
of every species” (Fallon 40). Learning and intuiting what nature knows and working with
it has always been at the heart of georgic writing. Georgic writing has always been an act
of biosemiotics, that of reading the signs in the environment and its inhabitants to adjust
behaviour and best practices. A contemporary georgic sense of a radical mutual agency
that has a continuity with past knowledge is perhaps alive but implicit in underpinning
some of texts that have been discussed here as representative of contemporary georgic
literature.
Submission received 18 June 2020 Revised version accepted 7 September 2021
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Works Cited
Armitage, Simon. Still. Enitharmon, 2016.

--- . Reading at the University of Leeds ‘Reworking Georgics’ conference, 10 September
2019.
Avery, Mark. Inglorious: Conflict in the Uplands. Bloomsbury, 2015.
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition.
Routledge, 1991.
Bullough, Tom. Addlands. Granta, 2016.
Bragg, Marie-Elsa. Towards Mellbreak. Chatto & Windus, 2017.
Burris, Sydney. The Poetry of Resistance: Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition. Ohio
Cocker, Mark. Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? Jonathan
Cape, 2018.
Connell, John. The Cow Book: A Story of Life on a Family Farm. Granta, 2018.
Crace, Jim. Harvest. Picador, 2013.
--- . Interview. The Guardian. 17 August 2013.
Deer, Jemma. Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Evans, Paul. The Guardian Country Diary. 20 April 2020.
Fairer, David. English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700-1789. Longman, 2003.
--- . “‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-Georgic,” Studies in
Eighteenth Century Culture, no. 40, 2011, pp. 201-218.
Fallon, Peter. The Georgics of Virgil. The Gallery Press, 2004.
Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Year. Hodder & Stoughton, 2003.
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Frawley, Oona. Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature. Irish
Academic Press, 2005.
Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. Routledge, 2020.
--- . “What is Georgic’s Relation to Pastoral?”. Georgic Literature and the Environment:
Working Land, Reworking Genre, edited by Sue Edney and Tess Somervell. Routledge,
2022.
Harrison, Melissa. All Among the Barley. Bloomsbury, 2018.
Head, Dominic. “The Farming Community Revisited: Complex Nostalgia in Sarah Hall and
Melissa Harrison.” Green Letters, https://doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2020.
1842788.
Heaney, Seamus. “Eclogues In Extremis: On the Staying Power of Pastoral.” Proceedings of
the Royal Irish Academy, no. 103C.1, 2003, pp. 1-12.
--- . “Glory be to the world.” The Irish Times. 23 October 2004.
Henson, Adam. Countryfile: Adam’s Farm: My Life on the Land. BBC Books, 2011.
Jones, Cyran. The Long Dry. Granta, 2006.
Jukes, Helen. A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees. Scribner, 2018.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Bloomsbury, 2015.
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Ladino, Jennifer K. Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature.

University of Virginia Press, 2012.
Monbiot, George. Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. Allen
Lane, 2015.
Newton, Ian. Farming and Birds. William Collins, 2017.
O’Donoghue, Bernard. The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. Cambridge
Pears, Tim. The Horseman. Bloomsbury, 2017.
--- . The Wanderers. Bloomsbury, 2018.
--- . The Redeemed. Bloomsbury, 2019.
Pellicer, Juan Christian. “Georgic as Genre: The Scholarly Reception of Vergil in Mid-
Eighteenth Century Britain.” Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and
Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship, edited by Silvio Bär and Emily
Hauser, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp.79-93.
Potts, Donna. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition. University of Missouri
Press, 2011.
James Rebanks, James. The Shepherd’s Life. Penguin, 2015.
Rewilding Britain. https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/rewilding. Accessed 24 May
2020.
Rigby, Kate. Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation.
Bloomsbury, 2020.
Sayre, Laura. “’How/to make fields fertile’: Ecocritical Lessons from the History of Virgil’s
Georgics in Translation.” Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity, edited by
Tree, Isabella. Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. Picador, 2018.
Virgil. The Georgics. Translated by L. P. Wilkinson. Penguin, 1982.
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Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees. William Collins, 2017.
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Author: Mäntymäki, Helen Title: The Polar Bear in Fortitude. Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate
Change
The Polar Bear in Fortitude.

Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Change
Helen Mäntymäki
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
[email protected]
Abstract
In the first season of the television Eco Noir crime series Fortitude (2015) the polar bear appears
as a sticky object that embodies an ambiguous affective charge as an icon of global warming. This article
discusses the ways in which the polar bear evokes viewer affect in the series through two discourses. The
first one relates to violence, essentially present in crime narratives, and how the human and nonhuman
animal are positioned in relation to global warming, violence and each other. It raises questions of place
and belonging in a local and global context and examines how the polar bear is constructed in terms of
stranger danger and victimization in relation to human animals and the threat of global warming. The
second one targets the ways in which the polar bear is rendered sticky as the object of the human gaze and
how this process of human animals looking at photographs of bears both constructs and deconstructs the
subject-object relation, hierarchy and agency. Methodologically, the article draws on “close looking” and the
main theoretical starting points are ecocriticism and affect theory. The article argues that the
representation of the polar bear contributes in essential ways to the socially and environmentally critical
emphasis essential in contemporary crime narratives including Fortitude: the distracting and emotionally
charged representation of the polar bear evokes ambiguous affective responses in viewers. Thus, as the
article further argues, a representation of this kind is capable of—and liable to— inducing a heightened
awareness of the present environmental crisis than a more straightforward, less affectively charged
representation.
Keywords: Polar bear, global warming, affect, crime fiction, Fortitude.
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Resumen
En la primera temporada de Fortitude (2015), la serie policial de televisión Eco Noir, el oso polar
aparece como una figura recurrente que representa una carga afectiva ambigua como símbolo del
calentamiento global. Este artículo analiza las formas en las que el oso polar provoca el afecto del espectador
en la serie, a través de dos discursos. El primero se identifica con la violencia, fundamentalmente presente
en las narrativas del crimen, y en cómo se posicionan los seres humanos y no humanos en relación con el
calentamiento global, la violencia y entre sí. Suscita cuestiones de lugar y pertenencia en un contexto local
y global e identifica cómo se construye la figura del oso polar en términos del peligro del extraño y la
victimización en relación con la humanidad y con la amenaza del calentamiento global. El segundo se centra
en las formas en las que el oso polar se vuelve complicado como objeto de la mirada humana y cómo este
proceso de personas que miran fotos artísticas de osos construye y deconstruye la relación sujeto-objeto,
la jerarquía y la agecialidad. Metodológicamente, el artículo se basa en un “análisis detallado” y los
principales puntos de partida teóricos son la ecocrítica y la teoría del afecto. El artículo sostiene que la
representación del oso polar contribuye de manera esencial al énfasis social y medioambientalmente
crítico, esencial en las narrativas criminales contemporáneas, incluida Fortitude: la representación del oso
polar que distrae y con carga emocional evoca respuestas afectivas ambiguas en los espectadores. Por lo
tanto, como se argumenta además en el artículo, una representación de este tipo es capaz —y propensa a—
inducir una mayor conciencia de la actual crisis ambiental que una representación más directa y con menos
carga afectiva.
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Palabras clave: Oso polar, calentamiento global, afecto, novela negra, Fortitude.
Introduction
The opening scene of the UK-produced Noir television crime series Fortitude
(2015) shows a polar bear tearing a man to pieces on the seashore among blocks of ice.
The man is screaming in pain, a shot is fired, and a red spot appears on his forehead. The
bear disappears from the scene, leaving behind the remains of the half-eaten man. After
this violent first encounter, polar bears appear explicitly in the images or spoken
discourse more than seventy times during the first season: a motionless stuffed bear
greets passengers in the arrivals hall of the airport; a dead bear lies on a dissection table
waiting to be cut open by scalpels for scientific purposes; a friendly polar bear talks with
other animals in a TV cartoon; a child’s drawing of a cute polar bear is pinned to the wall
in a house; artistic photos of wild bears are displayed and discussed as well as used as
props; moreover, the danger of bear attacks is constantly talked about. The polar bear is
omnipresent in Fortitude. Dead or alive, it occupies—and haunts—the minds of the
inhabitants on the island and enters the minds of the viewers, at the same time calling for
affective responses.
In this article, I investigate the ways in which the polar bear becomes affectively
charged in the first season of Fortitude as an indicator of the human-nature relationship
and of climate change. Images of polar bears circulate in different media as icons of global
warming whose habitat is gradually melting away as temperatures in the polar regions
are rising (see Manzo). The more the news of declining populations and shocking images
of starving bears circulate, the more directly they are associated with environmental
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crises and the stronger their affective charge becomes. Further, beautiful images of
healthy mother bears nursing their playful cubs surrounded by icebergs in sunshine also
provide disturbing reminders that the polar bear is no longer safe in its natural habitat.
The affective charge of the bear is ambiguous since all these images evoke affect mixed
with both anxiety and pleasure. This ambiguity is also visible at a symbolic level: in the
world of melting icebergs, the previous symbol of cold has turned into a symbol of warmth
(Garfield) that still carries with it the reminder of the world as it should be and as it was
before melting glaciers.
Emphasizing the social and cultural significance of affective engagement, Mike
Hulme points out that the “power of the polar bear icon to represent climate change in the
minds of the public rests on its emotional appeal” (242). Other scholars have also recently
paid attention to the ways in which climate change is communicated in the media and
argue that affectively or emotionally engaging narratives, including the ones circulating
in the media and popular culture, may actually generate action for combating climate
change (Weik von Mossner; Koistinen and Mäntymäki). I firmly believe that speaking
through affect may indeed be a more efficient way of raising awareness as opposed to the
rationally motivated knowledge of tables and statistics. For example Deborah Gould has
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argued that emotions are an important force in activism. Even though Donna Haraway
cautions that the sorrow evoked by dystopian visions of the future might not necessarily
move people to action (3), psychologist Panu Pihkala has claimed that the complex
emotions, including anxiety, raised by the threat of changing climate can serve as catalysts
for climate action. Hyvärinen, Koistinen and Koivunen have indeed argued that tackling
the pressing questions of climate and the environment requires accepting the difficult
affects or emotions that influence the capability to generate the knowledge required to
answer those questions. Art or the media are clearly platforms for dealing with these
emotions.
In what follows, I discuss two examples from Fortitude that highlight the ways in
which the representation of the polar bear evokes affective engagement in relation to
global warming in the first season of Fortitude. In both of these examples, the relationship
between the human and nonhuman animal and their vulnerability in the face of the
threatening ecological catastrophe is visible through a negotiation of their relationship as
inhabitants of the isolated eponymous island up north. In the examples below I first
elaborate the relationship between the human and nonhuman animal in the context of
violence in which the vulnerability of both is highlighted in the face of global warming. I
show how the bear is constructed as a stranger trespassing on the human domain while
alive, but occupies the same space with human animals when lying dead on a dissection
table. Second, I target the representation of the polar bear by focusing on how the bear’s
affective “stickiness” (Ahmed Cultural) is generated through the gazes of both the human
animal looking at the nonhuman animal and the nonhuman animal looking at the human
animal in a scene where bear images by photographer Henry Tyson (Michael Gambon)
are displayed. While the first discussion thematizes issues such as space, place and
belonging and not belonging, the second one challenges questions of hierarchy, subject-
object relation and, further, agency. I argue that the representation of the polar bear
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remains highly ambiguous throughout the first season of the series, and this volatility is
precisely the source of the affective charge experienced by viewers.
In their editorial to a special issue of Green Letters on crime fiction and ecology, Jo
Lindsay Walton and Samantha Walton point out the role of crime fiction as a form of
specialist knowledge “with its own distinct contributions to make to cultural
understandings of human-nature relations and environmental crisis” (2). While
contemporary crime fiction—and particularly contemporary Nordic Noir—has become
known for its sociocritical concerns that have also attracted intense scholarly interest (e.g.
Arvas and Nestingen; Forshaw; Bergman), it is no surprise that in a time when the climate
is warming at an alarming rate, this mobile genre is increasingly tackling questions
related to ecology with the same critical grasp. Marta Puxan-Oliva points out “crime
fiction’s tendency to address conflicts from a global perspective” (363) and, referring to
ecocritic Ursula Heise, pays attention to the capability of crime fiction to address global
concerns through narratives of local phenomena. Ecological catastrophes do not confine
themselves to national borders, and this trend is detectable for example in recent
television crime series that address the cross-national connections and impacts of
ecology-related crimes from a local vantage point. A number of television series such as
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the Swedish-Danish Bron/Broen (The Bridge, 2011–2018), the Finnish Tellus (2014), the
Swedish Jordskott (2015–2017), the Finnish Karppi (2018), the Danish Bedraeg (Follow
the Money, 2016) and the Swedish Thin Ice (2020) target ecological crimes with cross-
national impacts and address ethical questions in the contexts of ecoterrorism, normative
humanity and ruthless profit-seeking in the energy business.
Methodological Concerns
Methodologically, I rely on contextualising close reading—or close looking

(Paasonen “Disturbing”; Salovaara)—which entails careful and detailed watching of the
television series and awareness of how our watching experience combines with the text
in the cultural context and frames of interpretation. Although the affects evoked by fiction
are always uncertain (Tomkins 74), I assume that the circulation of images and
discourses, whether in ecological crime fiction (Eco Noir) such as Fortitude or other
fiction, mobilizes and calls into question conceptions of collective values. Because
representations not only reflect culture but also actively take part in processes of meaning
production and the construction of emotions (e.g. Ahmed Strange; Cultural; Butler; Helle;
Pitkämäki; Koistinen), interpreting them is equally culturally embedded.
Moreover, Cristopher Breu argues that certain genres do “take shape as a specific
affective mood or atmosphere” (244) through which their effect is created (see also
Isomaa 71; Lyytikäinen 55). Detecting the particular affect of Noir crime fiction, Breu pays
attention to how the Noir affect is governed by overall negativity and the discomfort of
proximity as a cause of anxiety (247-248; see also Oliver and Trigo). Noir, according to
Breu, represents “the artistic engagement with forms of affect and their narrativisation
[that] pushes its audience to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and the
world they live in” (249). Global warming undoubtedly is an uncomfortable truth and a
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source of constantly spreading climate anxiety (or eco-anxiety), a topic regularly taken up
in the media (e.g. Taylor and Murray). Moreover, in his discussion of two British noir
series, Hinterland and Southcliffe, Les Roberts pays attention to how “the stories can be
said to have grown out of the landscape” (375). Human geographer Tim Cresswell defines
landscape in terms of dependence of place (12); in Fortitude place, characterized by
human presence in the harsh climate, becomes inherently intertwined with the cold,
snowy landscape that participates in the mental-emotional processes of meaning
construction that form the particular affective mood of the series. Christiana Gregoriu
further describes the crime genre as a carnivalesque genre because of the pleasure it
assumes in the affective: violence, the marginal and the irrational (100, 101). The violence
typically contained in crime fiction, including Fortitude, based on disgust and pleasure
adds to the volatility of affect produced by the narrative (Bacon 7-11; Koistinen and
Mäntymäki).
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Affect and the Polar Bear
The image of the polar bear is what in affect scholar Sara Ahmed’s terms can be
described as a “sticky object”. According to Ahmed, sticky objects are “produced as effects
of circulation” within sociocultural and ideological contexts that allow and call for
saturation with affect (Cultural 8). The more these images circulate in culture, the stickier
they grow and the stronger their affective charge becomes. The polar bear is saturated
with affect as perhaps the stickiest icon of global warming. This fascination with the large
predator stems partly from the special cultural roles of bears—brown, black or white—
among the peoples of the northern hemisphere: bears have traditionally been feared and
worshipped because of their size (the polar bear is the largest land predator with a weight
of up to 700 kilograms), strength and the danger they represent, and stories of them have
circulated in cultures for thousands of years, rendering them sticky with mystery, respect
and fear (e.g. Ruponen). With the advent of ecological crime fiction, the polar bear enters
a new context as part of the socioecological criticism of the genre.
When it comes to the polar bear and affect, it is crucial to take into account the
cultural embeddedness of affect. Instead of regarding affect as a precognitive bodily
sensation and emotion as a culturally processed, explained or understood phenomenon, I
see both affect and emotion, following Ahmed and Paasonen, as referring to a relationship
with the world. As Ahmed writes, it is impossible to separate immediate emotional
intensities such as fear or loathing from cultural contexts, values or memories, which
means that the immediate physical reaction is always already connected to cognitive
processes (Cultural; Paasonen “Affekti” 42). The recognition of “somebody as a stranger”
(Ahmed Cultural 21; italics in original) and a fearsome object—for example if we
encounter a polar bear in our home street—is intertwined and simultaneous with the
bodily reactions that indicate fear. Interestingly, Ahmed actually uses the bear as an
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example while explaining how fear is shaped by “cultural histories and memories”
(Cultural 7). The circulation of affect in Fortitude thus takes part in the formation of
affective histories and memories connected to the bear as a fearsome animal—and as a
symbol of the present climate crisis. For a viewer of a crime television series also the
previous knowledge of the genre forms a part of the affective ambience. Below I use affect
as the overall term when discussing viewer affect; I use emotion when I refer to the
representations of emotions of single characters thus holding on to the embodiedness of
affect as possible only with real, living viewers and the representations of the emotions of
the characters on the screen through different markers discernible by the viewers.
Fortitude as Eco Noir Crime Fiction
Season One of Fortitude starts off as a crime narrative governed by the basic crime
formula: a murder is committed, a detective arrives from the outside and eventually the
murder mystery is solved. This, however, is only a starting point for a story with an
abundance of subnarratives, murders and fake murders, and several official and unofficial
investigators, in which the mysterious deaths are not always causes of personal or social
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evil but are tied in various ways to the consequences of melting glaciers and climate
change.
After the violent initial encounter with the polar bear, the viewer is introduced to
a multinational community living on a fictional secluded island in “a cold climate”
(Forshaw) somewhere off the Norwegian coast, populated by 713 people and 3,000 polar
bears, as Governor Hildur Odegard (Sofie Gråbøl) states in Episode One of the first season.
When an inhabitant of the small town, Dr Stoddart (Christopher Eccleston), is found dead
in his home with his rib cage torn open, the first suspect in fact is a polar bear. However,
it is soon discovered that the violent attacks on Stoddart and the later victims are
committed by human animals invaded and contaminated by parasite wasps, whose
procreative behaviour of drilling into the bodies of large animals to lay their eggs is
transferred to humans through genome-changing poison that compels them to drill into
the bodies of other humans, using any sharp objects at hand. These wasps originate from
mammoth carcasses now emerging from under the melting glacier after having been
buried in the permafrost for 30,000 years. In addition to the two main narrative strands
of solving the initial murder and coping with the wasp threat, the first season of Fortitude
weaves several other narrative strands into the story. These range from the consequences
of unrequited love and adulterous relationships to a glacier hotel project to save the
economy of the island when the coal mines are becoming depleted.
Fortitude can be described as an Eco Noir crime story faithful to Nordic Noir. The
environmental theme is a central constituent of the narrative and, through the
incorporation of the threat of global warming into a murder narrative, the critical gaze of
the series goes beyond an analysis of injustice and violence in human societies only.
Besides the social and societal critique typical of Nordic Noir, the series embodies its
ecological critique in the frame of a popular crime narrative. “Gloomy, pensive and
pessimistic in tone” (Arvas and Nestingen 2), it features alienated characters in a cold and
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harsh environment, struggling with social and emotional problems (see Forshaw). Kerstin
Bergman has paid attention to the semantic significance of the environment, particularly
the rural settings in Swedish crime fiction (Swedish); the significance of the northern
environment is indeed extremely pronounced in Fortitude, because the story is essentially
bound within its specific cold and harsh setting. Jacob Stougaard-Nilsen’s characterization
of Nordic Noir as featuring “dark, dystopian and excessively violent narratives” (9) is true
of Fortitude: the series can be read as an environmental dystopia embedded in a crime
story format. A narrative like this, with the polar bear emerging as an ambiguous
expression of the complexity of the threatening environmental crisis, can only be told
where both human and bear inhabitants are rendered vulnerable.
Polar Bears in Crime Television Series
Although Nordic landscapes may play central roles in Nordic Eco Noir narratives,
the roles of animals in contemporary crime series seldom go beyond being mere props or,
alternatively, animals tend to feature as anthropomorphic references to human
characteristics in solving the crime case. We tend to interpret animals in relation to
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humanity, human identity and subjectivity (McHugh, “Animal” 24), and animals are often
represented as flat prototypes of humans. In the French crime TV series La fôret (2017)
for example, a white wolf appears in this kind of role as a fleeting metaphor of the female
protagonist’s trauma and intuition that leads her to the roots of the murder mystery
buried in the fearsome forest. In these cases, “animals are present but the question of the
animal is not” (Bolongaro 109). In the above mentioned crime television series Thin Ice,
the polar bear features as a prop that also embodies metaphorical and referential
meanings as an icon of global warming. The big predator is not as omnipresent as in
Fortitude but its presence is explicitly linked with melting glaciers. However, despite its
less prominent role, it embodies an affective charge that draws from both its fearsome
and strange otherness (see Ahmed Strange) and its victim status which it shares with all
inhabitants, human and nonhuman, of the Arctic areas and beyond.
The Ambiguous Place of the Fearsome Stranger
A constant negotiation between in- and outsiderness is notable in Fortitude and

links with the ways in which the polar bear is constructed in terms of affect as a sticky
object. The inside refers to the town and human presence on the island and the outside to
the environment inhabited by the polar bears. Referring to cultural critic Raymond
Williams’s classic work The Country and the City (1973), Marta Puxan-Oliva pays attention
to the ways in which environmental crime fiction constantly renegotiates the previously
alleged difference between the country as a rural idyll preserving morality and the city as
its opposite, an environment prone to encourage criminality (364). In Fortitude, the town
is indeed depicted as a place of characters with dodgy backgrounds and suspect
intentions. However, the overall setting in the series does not rely on a juxtaposition of
town vs. country as a marker of different moral attitudes visible in environmental crime
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fiction as described by Puxan-Oliva, but is based on a more radical negotiation between
the inside, where the small human population resides, and the outside that is constantly
infiltrating and questioning its existence; the inside is never constant but continuously
fragmented by the wild and disturbing outside, inhabited by dangerous polar bears. As
Richard C. Stedman argues, place is a complicated compilation of the physical
environment and socially constructed factors, including myths and memories (Urry;
Marcus). In Sheriff Dan Anderssen’s (Richard Dormer) speech to a group of miners in the
local pub, the town has more or less been swallowed by the outside; the speech constructs
the place on the narrative—or myth—of the natural environment: “When people think of
this place, they think of the ice, bears, mountains” (Episode 7). How the place accentuates
particularly the polar bear is further indicated by a poster on the pub wall with a text that
urges people to respect them and leave them alone to roam their natural habitat (Episode
2).
For the inhabitants of the town of Fortitude and the viewer, the polar bear is
constructed in terms of difference and outsiderness as a dangerous stranger that haunts
and scares through its fearsome potential. Sara Ahmed has paid attention to the
omnipresence of the stranger and points out how “strangers are read as posing danger
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wherever they are” (Strange 32). The polar bear carries its fearsomeness as a potential
that can be realized at any time; in that sense the bear is always there as a known prospect
although it remains to be defined through its belonging to the outside. It is precisely this
paradox of proximity and the recognition of “not belonging, … being out of place” that
Ahmed further regards as essential in the construction of the stranger (Strange 21;
emphasis in original). This paradox leads to the question who actually is out of place, the
polar bears “in their natural habitat” or the human animals who, ironically, are
responsible for destructive potential far more dangerous from the perspective of the
global ecosystem.
Sheriff Dan’s line about “this place” as not including the town is descriptive of how
the outside has infiltrated what normally would be seen as the human sphere, as home.
Stedman’s definition of place as encompassing “the physical setting, as well as human
experience and interpretation” (672) is relevant here. When discussing the stranger and
the danger it poses, Ahmed points out that defining the stranger as dangerous makes
possible the definition of home as a safe place (Strange 32). She writes: “Such a
recognition of those who are out of place allows both the demarcation and enforcement
of the boundaries of ‘this place’, as where ‘we’ dwell. The enforcement of boundaries
requires that some-body—here locatable in the dirty figure of the stranger—has already
crossed the line, has already come too close” (Strange 21-22).
In Fortitude, however, the viewer is repeatedly reminded of how the polar bear
shatters this feeling of safety by constantly coming emotionally too near and breaking the
boundary between in- and outsiderness. The police advise Detective Inspector Morton
(Stanley Tucci), a newcomer to the town, to carry a large gun in case he meets a polar bear
because a small one will not stop it, and shows as evidence images of the savaged body of
Billy Pettigrew (Tam Dean Burn), maimed by a polar bear in the beginning (Episode 1).
For the viewer, this way of describing the polar bear in terms of its generating extreme
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fear, as an automaton that attacks with intention to kill whenever met, represents a
dichotomous view between human animals and non-human animals. However, in the
context of global warming that the series explicitly deals with, the viewer is informed
about the reasons why the bears may trespass over the town and hunt what they normally
would not hunt. Because of this knowledge, the viewer’s affective response is not only
based on the fear caused by the fearsomeness of the great predator but also on sympathy
towards the nonhuman animal struggling for its existence in the changing environment.
Moreover, the danger to the bears’ survival caused by global warming and melting
glaciers and their occasional trespassing on the human domain are also presented in
another light by Governor Odegard who exploits the commercial potential of the exotic
animal in her speech to a group of prospective investors in a large-scale hotel project:
“‘Sometimes a bear comes to town and then the police have to carefully usher him out
again’” (Episode 2). In her description the bear is no longer a fearsome stranger; instead,
it has turned into an animal lost in the strange and scary human environment that
requires human help to find its way back to its own habitat. However, through a humorous
anthropomorphization of the island bears she expresses an inherent stranger fear:
referring to the number of bears (3,000) in relation to humans (713), she jokes about what
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would happen if the bears were to get organized and thereby resorts to a rhetoric through
which the bear is again labelled a fearsome stranger. Here the viewer is moved between
empathy and fear.
It can be deduced from the above that affective circulation of imagery constructs a
negotiation through which the relationship between the human and the nonhuman
animal is both distanced and brought together. This negotiation is launched from the very
first images of Pettigrew’s death and continues throughout the first season. Rosi Braidotti
has paid attention to how dominant humanity is negotiated in relation to “those who are
other-than-human … along the axes of devalorized difference” (1). For the dominant
human subject the other-than-human is a source of anxiety because of its capacities to
“illuminate the asymmetry of power relations that work in the constitution of the
dominant subject” (Braidotti, Posthuman 1) and to fragment the story about dominance
on which the subjectivity is based. These questions of dominance become clear in human-
bear relations, where both have the potential to cause each other harm. Koistinen and
Mäntymäki establish that the killing of scientist Charlie Stoddart in the first episode is an
example of how the human/bear boundary is negotiated in the intersection of different
forms of violence, including the objectification of both human and nonhuman bodies in
scientific examination. Because of the “inhuman savagery” (Episode 6) of the killing, the
obvious suspect is a bear who “shouldn’t come here” (Episode 1). However, quite soon it
becomes evident that the victim’s wounds cannot have been inflicted by a bear, and when
the killing is revealed to be committed by a 10-year-old boy, detective Eugene Morton
from Scotland Yard, originally sent to investigate the death of Billy Pettigrew, begins to
wonder about the source of this “savagery” (Episode 6). The moment when the killing
turns into murder highlights the animal and human animal distinction. Christoffer
Pittard’s point that “The animal cannot be murdered (only killed)” (8) also applies when
turned around: the nonhuman animal cannot murder because the moral code on non-
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violence is traditionally only applicable to human animals (e.g. Aaltola 16-19). However,
when it is later found out that the murderers’ violent behaviour actually originates from
parasite wasps released from under the melting permafrost, the critique of the
anthropocentric notions of traditional humanism that associate responsibility, guilt and
moral consciousness essentially with humanity becomes relevant. By claiming that in the
end, all of the killings either by polar bears or human animals come down to humanity’s
destructive activity that has caused the permafrost to melt with inconceivable
consequences, the series delivers a political argument: human agency on the planet is in
stark contrast with the idea of morality as the guiding principle of human animals.
Delivered effectively through many scenes of graphic violence that connect to and
emphasize the yet unknown dangers of global warming, this argument invites emotional
responses that engage the viewer affectively.
In addition, the violence of the murders brings human and nonhuman violence
together in another way, namely by showing that human and nonhuman animals are on a
par when it comes to gruesome violence. The moment when the viewers are forced to
acknowledge that the violent acts have been committed not by a polar bear but by a
human being, cultural histories and memories that produce the viewer’s emotional
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response to the polar bear as a fearsome other are displaced and relocated in the human,
in the viewers themselves, in “us.” This further resonates with the undertone of human
violence towards what is outside humanity, including polar bears, that pervades the
series.
Yet another example of the blurring of the dichotomy between human and
nonhuman takes place later in the series (Episode 9), when the carcass of a polar bear that
had behaved abnormally is examined by two biologists, Vincent Rattrey (Luke
Treadaway) and Natalie Yelburton (Sienna Guillory), at the Fortitude Arctic Research
Center. The scene opens with an image of a large polar bear in a fridge, covered with
plastic. The next image shows the bear lying on its side on the dissection table with its
front covered with blood from having attacked, killed and eaten another full-grown male.
The high camera angle shows Vincent on his knees on the table next to the bear and
Natalie standing behind it, both admiring the magnificent animal. The whole bear is visible
and its size is further emphasized with the camera angle, showing all three from the front.
Later, Vincent cuts off the bear’s head and begins to examine its brain. In the following
scene the two biologists, Sheriff Dan and Governor Odegard are gathered around the same
dissection table with the headless bear still lying on it. Because of the similarities between
the bear and the human killer’s behaviour, Vincent wants to run the same tests on the
brain of the now dead murderer Shirley Allerdyce (Jessica Gunning) in order to find out
whether both were affected by the same toxins because, like the bear, ‘“Shirley Allerdyce
was an apex predator […] at the top of the food chain”’ (Episode 9). Dan and Hildur look
very concerned when the biologists explain that if the toxins are identical, the island is too
dangerous ‘“for any animal”’ (Episode 9). The camera pans from the dead bear to the
worried faces of Dan, Hildur, Vincent and Natalie, making explicit the connection between
“any animal” and their shared vulnerability. This becomes even more explicit when
Shirley’s lover Markus Huseklepp (Darren Boyd) later arrives to see her at the Arctic
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Research Center to which she has been moved from the morgue to be tested (Episode 10).
Devastated by the move, Markus’ comment “This place is for animals,” introduces a
hierarchy based on the difference between human and nonhuman animals. The viewer is
here caught in an emotional swing. At one end, a realization of what could be described as
Rosi Braidotti’s idea of zoe as life itself, an inclusive and “generative power that flows
across all species” (103) and makes them equally vulnerable in life and death. That is
juxtaposed at the other end with the belief in human specificity built on separation,
estrangement, and the denial of interconnectedness in traditional humanism that is
criticized by Braidotti. At the end of the scene yet another reminder of the common
vulnerability of human and nonhuman animals is presented to the viewer through an
emphatic concluding image: the bear, covered in plastic, and back in the fridge next to
Shirley’s body, reminds the viewer of how they both are victims that end up on the
operating table for autopsy.
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The Polar Bear as the Object of the Gaze and the One Who Looks Back
A visual—filmic or photographic—representation of a polar bear is not a mirror

image of the original but constructed through complex processes of meaning-making
dependent on viewer and culture (Lehtonen 107–127). The photographs of polar bears
discussed here are embedded in an audiovisual crime narrative, which means that more
than one representational layer is added to the meaning-making process, as the narrative
and the narrative context provide a frame within which the photographs are to be
interpreted. Photographer Henry Tyson’s art photos of polar bears, embedded in an
audiovisual narrative discussing ecological themes, embody the potential to highlight the
ways in which the relationship between the human and nonhuman animal is constructed
and deconstructed.
The prominent themes in the series, such as global warming and anxiety before
inexplicable violence “set in a landscape that humans cannot possibly take on and win”
because of the “hulking presence of nature” (Bramley qtd. in Saunders 215), are
constituents that govern the way in which the polar bear is made the object of the gazes
of the characters in the narrative and the viewers and represented as a fearsome other
also in Tyson’s artistic photos. These photos are looked at and talked about by Governor
Odegaard and DI Morton when they visit Tyson’s studio. Both Odegard and Morton visit
Tyson in order to threaten him; in the intimidating atmosphere of the confrontations, the
photographs question and set in motion violence and agency while the bear appropriates
a role as a product of culture and an ironic comment on power assumed by humans.
John Berger emphasizes how people’s ways of looking at artistic images are
“affected by … learnt assumptions about art” (Ways 11) regarding for example beauty,
truth, genius and civilization, many of which are distanced from the everyday world.
Odegard comments on Tyson’s photos as artwork, emphasizing their cultural significance
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without which “… this place would be just a nameless block of ice in the middle of
nowhere…” (Episode 3). However, since the polar bear is “the most salient, the most eye-
catching element” (Kress and van Leeuwen 176, italics in original) in the images, not only
because of its size but also because the way in which the gaze of the polar bear as a
represented participant “directly addresses the viewer and establishes a relationship
between them” (89), the bear becomes accentuated in Odegard’s comment. She
transforms the polar bear into an art object of aesthetic pleasure achieved through the
artist’s ingenious work whereby the relationship between the object of the gaze and the
viewer is constructed on distancing; seeing the bear as an aesthetic object strips the bear
of its actuality, its “bearness,” and translates it into a work of art filtered through culture.
Although Odegard does not mention the fearsome potential of polar bears, it is immanent
in the representation and evokes viewer affect based on anticipation and uncertainty.
John Berger writes that “images were first made to conjure up the appearance of
something that was absent” (Ways 10). The absence of explicit threat notwithstanding,
the fearsomeness of the polar bear finds expression in this scene through the cultural
embeddedness of affect: viewers are affected by fear, while simultaneously knowing that
the images merely represent danger in the absence of the actual threat.
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The question of distance and fearsomeness is returned to by DI Morton when he is

looking at one of Tyson’s images already familiar to the viewer, the one of the bears eating
a seal carcass (this is never confirmed; it could be a human victim). The camera angle on
Morton is from back left, and what the viewer sees of the photo is only a corner with red
fleshy mush. Morton asks explicitly: “How close do you have to be to take something like
that?” Tyson’s answer “I used a camera with a very long lens” confirms Morton’s
assumption of potential danger and marks the bear as a fearful object. When writing
about the affective politics of fear, Sara Ahmed emphasizes the repetition of stereotypes
as a constituent of fear. Bodies become fearsome when they are repeatedly constructed
as such through selection and simplification in cultural processes (Cultural 63). It is true
that polar bears are predators who kill other animals for their food, and typically in
Western representation, polar bears, other bears and particularly wolves have through
centuries been depicted primarily through their predatory habits of hunting and killing
their prey, often emphasizing graphic and grotesque elements. The trope of killing is
accentuated in stories of predators even today, and predators appear as emblems of
fearsomeness in cultural discourses. So the production of the polar bear primarily as an
object of fear, like any other object of fear, depends on “past histories of association”
(Ahmed, Cultural 66) with fearsomeness. In addition to pre-knowledge, fear, according to
Ahmed, is linked to the “passing by” of an object; fear is “being produced by the object’s
approach” (Cultural 64-66; emphasis in original). This means that in order for the polar
bear to be fearsome, it must not be present but rather dwell in futurity because fear
according to Ahmed is anticipation of pain some time in future (Cultural 64-65). This
anticipation, I argue, is experienced by the viewer when the camera places Odegard and
later Morton in the same frame with a photo of a polar bear.
When Odegard comes to visit Tyson in his studio, the camera shows her standing
under the photo of the polar bear eating the carcass. The photo is sticky with affect
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because of the familiarity of similar images from other sources. Wearing a parka with a
sizeable arctic fox collar that provides an immediate association with a utilitarian attitude
towards animals, Odegard walks over to another photo of a bear standing in the red light
of the setting sun that the viewer associates with the blood in the previous photo, the
blood-stained bear eating Pettigrew at the beginning of the series, and the bear carcass
earlier on the dissection table. Having praised Tyson’s art, Odegard is again placed in the
same frame with the first photo of the feeding bear. The allusion to what is not present
but an object possibly approaching is made concrete through these images. To the viewer,
the images evoke the anticipation of future pain and they do so via visual means without
words. However, in this representation the polar bear’s stickiness derives from ambiguity
for not only is the polar bear a dangerous animal other, it is, at the same time, in an alliance
with human animals as victims of global warming.
The polar bear’s ambiguous charge becomes stronger in the scene in which DI
Morton visits Tyson’s studio and, acting like the detective he is as he walks from image to
image, he makes observations and asks analytical questions. The menace in his probing
questions about the murder case alternate with his comments on associations with
violence in the photos hanging on the walls. Morton enters into a dialogue with the images
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where the human animal’s moral agency is juxtaposed with the nonhuman animal’s ironic
reply, delivered through the gaze of the animals depicted in the images. Despite being
observers, human animals may also be observed by nonhuman animals (Berger, Why;
Derrida, Animal). This is what the bear in the photo with the red sunset seems to do; the
image is not visible to the viewer when Morton stops before it and states simply: “This
bear was in a fight” (Episode 3). Having placed the bear in the context of aggression,
Morton turns towards Tyson (and the viewer); the photo is now behind him with the
mouth of the bear right above his head as if the bear were about to eat him. From the
viewer’s perspective, the image points towards imminent danger although it is also ironic
in humorously pointing out that Morton, too, can be targeted despite his job as a detective.
It is also noteworthy that all of the photos in the room are looked at from a low angle by
the characters, thus placing the bear in a position of power from the perspective of both
the characters in the narrative and the viewer (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 140). When
discussing the nonhuman and human animal seeing each other, Berger emphasises the
power “comparable with human power” of the nonhuman animal, but stresses also a
difference in their qualities (Why 5).
The power constructed through the gazes of the human and nonhuman animal do
not coincide (the verb used by Berger) in this scene because the ambiguity and irony
contained in the representations of both the human and nonhuman animal set in motion
meaning and blur the viewers’ recognition of the bear as a dangerous stranger or an
animal in danger. The animal manifests its presence in a disconcerting way (Berger, About
19) and when the bear becomes ambiguous, a creature constructed on fear, irony, power
and myth, the viewers are brought to the fringe of truth about “bearness”. Ecocritic
Timothy Morton underlines how ambiguity is in fact the only possible certainty (“All”).
The representation of the polar bear in terms of ambiguity also seems to undermine DI
Morton’s self-conscious definitions of the bears. The photo that DI Morton looks at last in
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the scene is not shown to the viewer, and his generalizing comment on the photo, “They’re
very big, polar bears,” leaves the viewer in uncertainty as to what he is looking at. The
only certainty communicated to the viewer is an ambiguity that leaves the viewer
emotionally in midair.
Conclusions
I have argued above that in Fortitude the polar bear assumes a central position as
an ambiguous locus of the threat of global warming. Fortitude associates the polar bear
explicitly with violence in contexts where both violence and its perpetrators are not
univocal. In a speculative narrative asking the question What if? and promoting an
“expanded concept of generic identity” (Gill 82) beyond the normative anticipation of the
readers’ and viewers’ awareness of the contemporary sociocritical, realism-based crime
narrative, the polar bear embodies fears and expectations in the face of environmental
change. Fortitude, like crime narratives in general, draws on violence but instead of
pointing out a single case of murder or assault in a setting limited by social, national,
geographical or temporal constraints, the series engages the viewers in an affective
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vicious circle of fear, anxiety and anticipation based on uncertainty and indefinability: the
ambiguity of the representation of the polar bear calls for a renegotiation of the
dichotomies of perpetrator, victim, agent and object. In addition, because of the
ubiquitousness of the presence of the polar bear in contexts of global warming as a sticky
object, the series links with dystopic cautionary discourse that draws on the viewers’
recognizing and re-experiencing the affect associated with the representation of the polar
bear.
Submission received 15 June 2021 Revised version accepted 10 August 2021
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Author: Zechner, Iris Title: Materiality, Responsibility and Anthropocene Thought in Robert Macfarlane’s
and Kathleen Jamie’s Nature Writing
Materiality, Responsibility and Anthropocene Thought in Robert

Macfarlane’s and Kathleen Jamie’s Nature Writing
Iris Zechner
University of Graz, Austria
[email protected]
Abstract
The concept of the Anthropocene, denoting humans as geological agents, severely complicates
traditional Western distinctions between culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman world. Contrary
to anthropocentric accounts, the new materialisms have established a post-humanist reading of the
Anthropocene that destabilises such dichotomies, placing human beings on par with the world they
encounter. This approach can also be found in the New Nature Writing (NNW), a body of creative nonfiction
that seeks to reconnect the “human animal” to nature, with the ever-open question of the nature of nature
itself. A reading of Robert Macfarlane’s work with a focus on his recent Underland shows the ways in which
the growing awareness of the Anthropocene has influenced contemporary nature writing, allowing
Macfarlane to establish a non-anthropocentric perspective following the new materialisms. While likewise
adopting a new materialist stance, Kathleen Jamie’s collections of naturalist essays nevertheless question
the implications of this ontological framework, in particular with regard to ethics and human responsibility
in times of the Anthropocene.
Keywords: Anthropocene, New Nature Writing, ecocriticism, new materialisms, environmental ethics.
Resumen
El concepto del Antropoceno, que denota a los seres humanos como agentes geológicos, complica
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seriamente las distinciones occidentales tradicionales entre cultura y naturaleza, el mundo humano y el no
humano. Contrariamente a los relatos antropocéntricos, los nuevos materialismos han establecido una
interpretación posthumanista del Antropoceno que desestabiliza esas dicotomías, situando a los seres
humanos a la par del mundo con el que se encuentran. Este enfoque también se puede encontrar en la New
Nature Writing (nueva escritura de la naturaleza), una creciente colección de literatura que busca
reconectar el "animal humano" con la naturaleza, con la pregunta siempre abierta sobre la naturaleza de la
propia naturaleza. La lectura de la obra de Robert Macfarlane, con el foco en su reciente libro Underland,
revela las maneras en las que la conciencia creciente del Antropoceno ha influido en la escritura de la
naturaleza contemporánea, permitiendo a Macfarlane establecer una perspectiva no antropocéntrica, de
acuerdo con los nuevos materialismos. Mientras que Kathleen Jamie también adopta una posición
materialista, sus colecciones de ensayos naturalistas, sin embargo, cuestionan las implicaciones de este
marco ontológico, particularmente respecto a la ética y a las responsabilidades humanas en tiempos del
Antropoceno.
Palabras clave: Antropoceno, New Nature Writing, ecocrítica, nuevos materialismos, ética medioambiental.
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Introduction
The past two decades have seen a growing awareness of anthropogenic impact on
the Earth’s geology and ecology, increasingly imbuing public consciousness through news
reports as well as through various forms of art. 1 This thesis of the Anthropocene, i.e., the
proposed current geological age that denotes humankind as “a global geophysical force,”
severely complicates traditional Western distinctions between culture and nature, the
human and the nonhuman world (Steffen et al. 614). As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty
has influentially argued, the denotation of humans as “geological agents” implies the
collapse of a differentiation between natural history and human history (“The Climate of
History” 207). The latter, traditionally focused on the social, or the cultural, now emerges
to be inextricably entangled with the history of the planet itself, with the human species
having become “a force of nature in the geological sense” (Chakrabarty, “The Climate of
History” 207). The recognition of such unprecedented agency, of humankind as “the
dominant species on the planet,” invariably poses ethical questions of responsibility
towards the Earth and its inhabitants (Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital” 14). Following
the philosopher Clive Hamilton, the Anthropocene’s acknowledgment of humankind’s
dominant role implies an anthropocentric perspective, which should be embraced as a
means to meet this responsibility. The new materialisms, however, have established an
alternative reading of the Anthropocene: a post-humanist reading that places human
beings on a par with the world they encounter. 2 The present essay aims to locate such an
alternative view in the New Nature Writing (NNW), a movement that seeks to reconnect
the “human animal” to nature, with the ever-open question of the nature of “nature” itself
(Cowley par. 11 of 11). Readings of Robert Macfarlane’s and Kathleen Jamie’s works will
illuminate possibilities of re-interrogating the human condition and the ensuing ethical
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implications in times of the Anthropocene. A focus on Macfarlane’s recent book Underland
(2019), already counting amongst the most successful works of NNW, will demonstrate
the ways in which the growing awareness of the Anthropocene has influenced
contemporary nature writing. Whereas Underland manages to leave Macfarlane’s early
anthropocentric tendencies behind, it is in Jamie’s work where the ethics of a new
materialist perspective is more carefully contemplated and problematised.
First, however, a more thorough discussion of the indeed debated concept of the
Anthropocene is needed. It was first mentioned by meteorologist and Nobel prize winner
Paul Crutzen in 2000 and reasserted in a short article two years later, which proposed “to
assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated,
geological epoch” (Crutzen 23). This sweeping proclamation soon entered academic
discourse, with a newly formed interdisciplinary Working Group on the “Anthropocene”
(AWG) now calling for a formalisation of the epoch, suggesting the 1950s as its starting
point (Zalasiewicz et al. 58). In the humanities, responses are more diverse. In particular
1 For example, Trexler identifies a growing body of so-called climate fiction, which started to be recognised
around 2009 (7).
2 See, for example, Cohen (xxiv-xxv) for such a post-humanist reading of the Anthropocene.
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the etymology of the term “Anthropocene” has caused a certain uneasiness amongst
predominantly Marxist scholars, since its root, anthropos, seems to imply the creation of
a unity of all human beings that ignores social and cultural diversities. 3 Chakrabarty,
however, insists that the impalpable scope of the Anthropocene effectively demands such
a thinking in terms of species, arguing that “the analytics of capital (or of the market)” are
necessary but “insufficient instruments in helping us come to grips with anthropogenic
climate change” (“The Climate of History” 4). Hamilton, although favouring the term
“humankind” over “the human species”, seizes this point: “[i]f the Anthropocene is a
rupture of the history of the Earth as a whole,” he contends, “then it is also a rupture in
the history of humans as a whole” (61-62; 34). Signposting the diminishing economic
differences between the North and the South, he remarks that “[b]y 2050 at the latest the
objections to ‘Anthropocene’ will seem very dated” (30-31). China, with India hard on its
heels, still increases its fossil fuel emissions, justified (following Chakrabarty) as an
instrument to lift the poor out of poverty (“Climate and Capital” 12-13). This attempt to
advance equality concurrently advances global warming, complicating historical accounts
that propose a “Capitalocene” with the North as its primary actor (Malm 391). The
Anthropocene hence appears to me as indeed the more suitable term; in any case, it has
already been accepted by the natural sciences and as such, Hamilton notes, “it is here to
stay” (28). Accordingly, the present essay will use the Anthropocene as a denotation for
the current geological epoch that marks humankind as responsible for anthropogenic
changes in the Earth System. However, I consider it necessary to highlight that albeit it
seems unlikely that the term will be changed, it remains the role of the humanities to
critically discuss its possible implications, specifically in regard to the role of humankind
itself when meeting this new responsibility.
If we proceed on the assumption, then, that humankind as a whole has indeed
“imprinted an indelible mark on the planet” (Zalasiewicz et al. 59), we need to ask the (in
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Hamilton’s words) “epochal question: what is this being who has changed the course of
the Earth itself?” (35) The answer to this question profoundly varies, from radically
ecomodernist approaches, elevating humankind to the “creator” of nature (Ellis 321), to
absolutist post-humanist accounts that define “human nature” as “an interspecies
relationship” (Tsing 141). Whilst endorsing the conviction of a “special” position of
human beings revealed by the Anthropocene, Hamilton warns against the hubris implied
by ecomodernist thought: the unintended creation of the Anthropocene also tells us, he
argues, that humans are inseparably embedded in natural processes (52). With human
agency being “immersed in an Earth-world built by us out of nature but constrained by
it,” Hamilton maintains that “the worlds we make are never solely our creations, and the
Modern dreams of infinite world-creation are always subject to the centripetal pull of
Earth” (52; 63). The rhetoric discloses that in his “new anthropocentrism”, humankind’s
newly recognised collective agency on a geological level still raises us to “the world-
making creature” (again, the exceptional status of human beings is emphasised by the
3 See Malm for an influential argumentation against the use of the term “Anthropocene”. In Moore’s “The
Capitalocene Part I” and “The Capitalocene Part II”, the argument goes one step further, seeking to contest
‘social as well as environmental reductionism’ (“The Capitalocene Part II” 240).
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definite article), albeit straitened by natural forces (Hamilton 58). The new materialisms,
describing “a theoretical turn away from the persistent dualisms in modern and humanist
traditions” (Sanzo par. 1 of 11), allow to consider the Anthropocene as signalling “the
ultimate failure of the modernist project of domination,” as Hamilton puts it (89). The
predominant argument emphasises the interdependence of human and nonhuman
beings, acknowledged through the Anthropocene as an unintended consequence that lies
beyond our control. In stark contrast to Hamilton’s new anthropocentrism, new
materialists use this acknowledgment to affirm their strong rejection of any special status
being conferred on human beings. As Jeffrey J. Cohen has argued, the lack of intention
behind the creation of the Anthropocene separates agency from willpower, giving way to
new definitions of agency that equally include nonhuman matters (xxiv-xxv). 4 By
rendering human beings as one amongst many “knots in a vast network of agencies”
(Iovino and Oppermann 1), this alternative reading of the Anthropocene advances a post-
humanist approach where humans are not “the” special creature, do not “stand out from
nature as a whole” but are part of it (Hamilton 99). Hamilton cautions against such post-
humanist perspectives, contending that through the way it “deflates the significance and
power of humans on the planet,” “anti-anthropocentrism has the perverse effect of
denying our responsibility for the damage we have caused” (89; 98). I would instead
suggest a reading of the new materialisms as a way of endorsing respect for the Earth
System that we co-inhabit with various other matters, a respect that implies an invitation
to act with caution and care. It is exactly this invitation that we can find in the NNW, too.
As identified by Jason Cowley in 2008, British NNW represents a growing body of
creative nonfiction that is united by the aspiration to re-imagine “nature”, and human
(inter-)relationships with it in a time of ecological crisis. Some of its key practitioners
were and are, following Joe Moran, Mark Cocker, Roger Deakin, Kathleen Jamie, Richard
Mabey, and Robert Macfarlane, all sharing the endeavour to find “the extraordinary in the
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ordinary” (Cowley par. 7 of 11), focusing on everyday encounters with the nonhuman
natural world. As we will see, however, the global nature of the Anthropocene seems to
have encouraged a widening of scale (see, for example, Jamie’s essay “Aurora” in her essay
collection Sightlines), which acts not as a replacement of, but rather as an addition to the
microscale of everyday spaces. What has remained a key feature of the NNW, regardless
of the scale adopted, is its expression of an urgent need to reconnect human beings to the
nonhuman natural world, embracing an attitude of regarding the nonhuman world “with
wonder, but also with care” (Cowley par. 2 of 11). Alongside this evident parallel to
ecocritical thought, the NNW similarly has its roots in the early 1970s, when growing
environmental concern demanded a re-interrogation of the meanings of nature and
culture (Smith 4). Its much later proclamation by Cowley has caused some discontent
amongst critics and so-called New Nature Writers themselves, as the term itself seems to
ignore the movement’s concern with cultural processes: “‘nature’,” Smith remarks, “tends
4 For an influential theorisation of such “distributive agency”, building upon Bruno Latour’s
conceptualisation of actants as “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman,” see Bennett
(quotations taken from iii-ix, italics author’s own).
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to convey an evacuation of politics and ethics” (14). I still find it useful to mark the break
from what Cowley calls “old” nature writing (par. 6 of 11), a break that involves
incorporating traditionally unconventional settings for encountering “nature” and re-
interpreting modes of the pastoral in ways that speak to a world marked by
anthropogenic environmental damage (see Lilley, The New Pastoral). The present essay
will hence continue to deploy the term NWW to refer to this body of writing, asking the
reader to keep in mind that the “nature” in NNW is far from seeking to reproduce the old
nature-culture binary.
In an attempt to bring the theory discussed above together, the present essay will
use Robert Macfarlane’s and Kathleen Jamie’s nature writing to locate new
understandings of “nature”, as well as the very nature of human beings itself, that reflect
the complications and challenges posed by the Anthropocene. A focus on Macfarlane’s
Underland will illustrate the influence of the growing awareness of the Anthropocene on
contemporary nature writing, and demonstrate how the resulting changes in style and
settings, combined with the persisting attentiveness to everyday matters that is typical of
the NNW, allow to establish a non-anthropocentric perspective following the new
materialisms. While Jamie’s essay collections bear evident similarities to Macfarlane’s
recent work, likewise adopting a new materialist stance, I will show how her more
tentative and sceptical approach nevertheless questions the implications of this
ontological framework, in particular with regard to ethics and human responsibility in
times of the Anthropocene.
Robert Macfarlane: Towards Interspecies Discourse and Multi-Species Being
Arguably the most prominent figure in the NNW, Robert Macfarlane has produced
a number of critically acclaimed nonfiction books over the past two decades that feature
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various journeys to, and into near and remote places, driven by an urgent need to
rediscover and redefine ideas of the “wild”, or the “natural” in times of environmental
crisis. In tandem with his literal journeys and discoveries, Macfarlane’s writing has
travelled, too. While his thematic focus on “the ways in which nature and culture are
intricately interwoven with one another” (Alexander 8) continues to be woven into his
texts, connecting them as a clearly identifiable golden thread, his methodological
approach has set out on new paths—paths that have changed the very nature of the
human-nonhuman relationship conveyed through his work. So has his early book The
Wild Places (2007) been criticised for a resumption of conventional tropes of nature
writing, perhaps most trenchantly by fellow writer Jamie in her tellingly titled review “A
Lone Enraptured Male”. Alongside a critical reading of the enactments of class and gender
performed by The Wild Places, Jamie scarifies Macfarlane’s proclivity for what David
Matless identifies as a “foregrounding of the authorial voice” (178): “If there is a lot of ‘I’,”
she argues, “(and there is, in The Wild Places) then it won’t be the wild places we behold,
but the author” (“A Lone Enraptured Male” par. 12 of 24). Neal Alexander seizes this point,
contending that “[s]uch an emphasis upon voice and selfhood implies the persistence of
anthropocentrism” and, at the same time, “a lingering Romantic attachment to the
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authority of the solitary individual” (3). These anthropocentric tendencies are, as I would
argue, amplified by repeated descriptions of enchantment through the “wild” (see, for
example, WP 234), endorsing a “weak” anthropocentrism that seeks to respect and
protect nonhuman matters for their importance for human flourishing. 5 However, as
Deborah Lilley notes, Macfarlane already begins “to refocus his interpretation of nature
in all forms” (The New Pastoral 94): his initial understanding of wildness as something
“outside history” is profoundly challenged when he realises that “[e]very islet and
mountain-top, every secret valley or woodland, [has] been visited, dwelled in, worked, or
marked at some point,” a realisation that leads him to conclude that “[t]he human and the
wild cannot be partitioned” (WP 127). Whereas The Wild Places does not yet manage to
translate this idea of “the intersection of humans and nature” (Lilley, The New Pastoral
95) unambiguously into language, Lilley locates a growing “sensitivity towards ways of
looking at and interpreting the features and experiences of different landscapes, and the
human-nature relations that they signify” (The New Pastoral 228) in Macfarlane’s later
work The Old Ways (2012). The author’s “formula or set of coordinates by which the
landscape might be understood or discerned,” Lilley writes, “is understood to be one of
many” (The New Pastoral 229), suggesting an emerging parting of a univocal rendering of
the land and its inhabitants. This attentiveness to the multiplicity of ways of exploring a
particular place or landscape, indicating a necessity to allow for multiple perspectives, is
further pronounced in Underland (2019).
Being Macfarlane’s most recent and so-far most celebrated single-authored work,
Underland deals also most explicitly with the looming presence of the Anthropocene and
its implications for human-nonhuman relationships, ultimately taking a new materialist
approach that is enhanced by stylistic features. In what the book’s blurb describes as “an
epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds,” the author travels to both literal and
metaphorical underground spaces, embarking on “a deep time journey” (as the
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subheading proclaims) that encompasses Greenland’s glaciers as well as the city
catacombs of Paris, “starless” river systems as well as a laboratory studying dark matter,
Bronze Age burial chambers as well as a contemporary burial place for nuclear waste.
Albeit not fully able to uncouple itself from what Phil Hubbard and Eleanor Wilkinson call
“the conventional masculinist trope of the male wanderer who boldly strides into the
wilderness” (3), Underland represents a refined version of exploring the interrelations
between human and nonhuman matters that goes beyond the integration of traditionally
unconventional settings for nature writing. It is a version that focuses less on the author
himself but rather gives space to accounts from various experts in their own fields, an
exchange of knowledge often rendered in dialogical form. In further contrast to
Macfarlane’s earlier works, Underland incorporates a number of women’s voices, still
outnumbered by male contributors but slowly surfacing in his writing, alleviating the
gender bias criticised by Jamie (see “A Lone Enraptured Male”) and opening up new
perspectives. Advancing his continuing quest to find a language for our “more-than-
human world” (see Abram), Macfarlane’s attempt to deploy what he calls, after Robin Wall
5 See Norton for a first discussion of this concept.
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Kimmerer, a “grammar of animacy” (Underland 112) also gives more agency to nonhuman
matters through consciously coupling them with action verbs, such as in the beginning
section of the book: “[i]ce breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses”
(Underland 16). These changes in style allow for a more clearly and consistently
articulated understanding of the world in materialistic terms, compounded of “networks
of mutual relation” (Underland 418) that, as we will see, are most tangible on the
microscale associated with the NNW, creating an intimacy towards nonhuman matters
that emphatically illustrates their intrinsic value.
The struggle of coming to terms with the age of the Anthropocene is more
decidedly discussed on a macroscale, in particular in the chapters “The Blue of Time” and
“Meltwater”, where the influence of the current environmental crisis on contemporary
British nature writing comes patently into view. Covering Macfarlane’s travels around
Kulusuk Island in Greenland, these two chapters open up a global space going far beyond
the British Isles. The literal and metaphorical explorations of the local glaciers and bergs,
slowly melting into the ocean, intensify this globality through their symbolism for an all-
pervasive climate change, using a specific locale to create the “sense of planet” Ursula
Heise urgently demands (see Sense of Place and Sense of Planet). At the same time, they
epitomise the tension between humankind’s simultaneous significance and insignificance
in this global, “more-than-human” world. Amidst “[t]he immensity and the vibrancy of the
ice,” Macfarlane feels hugely aware of the smallness and ephemerality of humans as a
species when viewed “in deep time, even in the relatively shallow time since the last
glaciation – the notion of human dominance over the planet,” he writes, “seems greedy,
delusory” (Underland 362). While the reference to “deep time” illustrates a thinking that
goes beyond conventional timescales, the “vibrancy” Macfarlane bestows on the ice
evokes Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matters (2010) and its theory of distributive agency,
outlining agentic power as “a power possessed by nonhuman bodies too” (32). As his
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descriptions of, and reflections on ice as a substance show, Macfarlane acknowledges this
inclusive definition of agency: “ice is a shape-shifter and a state-shifter,” he muses a few
pages later. “It flies, it swims and it flows. […] Ice erases mountain ranges, but preserves
air bubbles for millennia” (Underland 379). In finding this epiphanic realisation of “the
vibrancy of the ice” in seemingly untouched nature, far from human civilisation, the
journey through Greenland bears resemblance to a traditional motif of pastoral escape in
the sense of “expectations of relief and restoration”, as Lilley describes it (The New
Pastoral 8). However, the moment of “relief and restoration” is severely qualified by a
sense of ecological crisis. “Looking out from that summit, I no longer feel awed and
exhilarated, but instead faintly sick,” Macfarlane writes shortly after his revelation,
remembering “the melt that is happening, that has happened, that is hastening”: he feels
“[s]ick at Greenland’s scale – but also by our ability to encompass it. […] The ice seems a
‘thing’ that is beyond our comprehension to know but within our capacity to destroy”
(Underland 362-3). What we encounter here is the deployment of what Lilley calls the
“new” pastoral, namely a reformed version of traditional pastoral conventions emerging
in contemporary British writing, caused by “the impact of contemporary environmental
conditions” (The New Pastoral 7). Instead of finding retreat and relief in the nonhuman
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natural world, the awareness of anthropogenic climate change, induced by the melting
landscape, seems to pose only more questions to Macfarlane, charging ice, as a metonymy
for the Anthropocene, as “a ‘thing’ that is beyond our comprehension to know”. This
moment shows quite plainly how any contemporary attempt at reinvigorating the
pastoral escape into “nature” will invariably, and inexorably serve as a reminder of human
influence on the nonhuman natural world; of an influence that appears both unavoidable
and unfathomable.
In a sense, however, this acknowledgment of the limits of human knowledge can
be read as a new understanding, too. Through imagining “our capacity to destroy”
together with human incomprehension of their own doings, with ice as “ungraspable to
human habits of meaning making” (Underland 379), the distributive nature of Bennett’s
model of agency becomes more visible, signifying an attempt “to counter the narcissism
of humans in charge of the world” (Bennett xvi) while still recognising the extent of
anthropogenic environmental damage. His depiction of the interaction of glacial agency,
reaching back millennia, with contemporary human doings allows Macfarlane to achieve
what Chakrabarty sees as so crucial when imagining the Anthropocene: “to think about
different scales simultaneously” (“The Climate of History” 3), both spatially and
temporally. In Underland’s chapter “The Understorey”, we will see the scale narrowing
again, moving the inherent value of nonhuman matters closer into focus and, in this
process, extending this new understanding of the world as composed through human and
nonhuman interactions.
As I have adumbrated, the “networks of mutual relation” between human and
nonhuman beings (Underland 418)—the “big picture”, so to say—materialise most
tangibly on the microscale adopted in “The Understorey”. In her essay “Unruly Edges”,
Anna Tsing draws on the “interspecies companionship” between “fungi and plant roots”
(143) to envision human nature as an “interspecies relationship”, too (144); in his
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impassioned exploration of what he calls, after forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, the
“wood wide web”—a forest’s underground network composed of roots, soil, and thread-
like fungi filaments—Macfarlane arrives at a very similar conclusion. Building on
biological research, he describes it as a “mysterious buried network, joining single trees
into forest communities,” forming a “subtle mutualism with plants” that allows them “to
communicate with each other,” in “ways we have scarcely begun to understand”
(Underland 88, 96). The “mysterious” character of this “interspecies aid-giving”
(Underland 88), lying just as the vast agencies of Greenland’s glacial landscape beyond
human comprehension, is pronounced more emphatically in a later scene, helping to
recognise its inherent value. Spending a night in London’s Epping Forest as part of a larger
group of people, talking and music-making, Macfarlane finds himself within “[d]rums,
songs, stories. The trees shifting, speaking, busy making meaning that I cannot hear”
(Underland 115). These trees, figured as meaning-making actants, and with them the
entire subterranean web connecting them, emerge as what Serenella Iovino and Serpil
Oppermann describe as “storied matter”: “a material ‘mesh’ of meanings,” interlocking
human and nonhuman matters “in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces”
(1-2). This notion is further intensified by the reference to “stories” that may be produced
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through the singing humans, the shifting trees, or both. By imagining the trees as meaning-
makers through “speaking” to other matters, speech and meaningful communication lose
their Cartesian status of being solely reserved for human beings, recognising meaning in
Karen Barad’s terms as “an ongoing performance of the world in its differential
intelligibility” (335) and, at the same time, emphasising the integrity of nonhuman
matters. But while Macfarlane “cannot hear,” cannot fully apprehend the more-than-
human communication humming beneath and around him, it does, in a vibrant example
of interspecies discourse, influence the way in which he experiences the nonhuman
natural world, and the very nature of human beings. So he writes that “nature seems
increasingly better understood in fungal terms: […] as an assemblage of entanglement of
which we are messily part. We are coming to understand our bodies as habitats for
hundreds of species of which Homo sapiens is only one, our guts as jungles of bacterial
flora, our skins as blooming fantastically with fungi” (Underland 103-104). Here,
Macfarlane zooms in even further, deep into the human body, and the human condition
itself. As Tsing, he perceives fungi, so small and often-overlooked, as “indicator species for
the human condition” (Tsing 144); as Tsing, he begins to understand humans “as multi-
species beings” (Underland 104) through fungi and their symbiotic networks.
By “high[lighting] what is typically cast in the shadow,” as we have seen, namely
“the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things” (Bennett ix),
Macfarlane adopts what Bennett calls an “ecological sensibility” (xi, italics author’s own),
contemplating these symbiotic networks as a model for new ways of living in the spirit of
Albrecht’s “Symbiocene”. Albrecht, to whom Macfarlane directly refers (see Underland
113), suggests letting the Anthropocene and its oppressive social (and ecological) systems
“become redundant as soon as possible” (13). Instead, he urges us to enter a new epoch
that he names the “Symbiocene”, marked by “symbiotic and mutually reinforcing life-
reproducing forms and processes” (14). In Macfarlane’s writing, a similar appreciation of,
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and desire for such alternative and all-inclusive reciprocal systems is inspired by the
wood wide web. “Recent studies suggest that well-developed fungal networks will enable
forests to adapt faster at larger scales to the changing conditions of the Anthropocene,” he
notes, already adumbrating that such mutually beneficial networks may allow humans to
“adapt faster at larger scales,” too (Underland 103). A few pages later, this idea of
embracing “mutualism”, “a prolonged relationship that is interdependent and reciprocally
beneficial,” is stated more explicitly (Underland 97): “[i]f there is human meaning to be
made of the wood wide web, it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into
the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the
inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human
communities” (Underland 113). Animated by both the “mysterious buried network” of the
forest (Underland 88) and Albrecht’s reflections on the Anthropocene, the formulation of
this vision of “collaboration”, “extended to more than human communities,” illustrates
once more an example of interspecies discourse, of how “human and nonhuman players
are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces,” to quote Iovino
and Oppermann again (2). And it is a vision that lasts, for it returns in “Surfacing”, the very
last section of the book (curiously titled identically as Jamie’s latest essay collection). Here
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we accompany Macfarlane and his youngest son on a walk through Nine Wells Wood,
Cambridge. “Lumps of white chalk lie among the ivy,” Macfarlane observes, “glowing in
the day-dusk of the wood. Dragonflies hunt the spring stream where it flows away from
us. Beneath and around us, invisibly, the fungal network connects tree to tree. […] My son
and I talk quietly about nothing much. We feel small in the universe, and together”
(Underland 425). Such as his early work The Wild Places, Macfarlane’s Underland ends
with a return to “nature” that is only a few miles from his home, following the common
thread in NNW of finding meaning “not in the rare or exotic but in our everyday
connections with the non-human natural world” (Moran 50). Quite in contrast to The Wild
Places, however, where such connections are elevated as evoking emotions like “hope, joy,
wonder, grace, tranquillity and others” (WP 236), Macfarlane now merely describes the
glowing white chalk, the dragonflies, the fungal networks, without attempting any
valuation. Through his engagement with different modes of living, and different ways of
imagining such modes, he has arrived at a point where he can “simply all[ow] nonhumans
to be what they are” for their own sake (Morton par. 14 of 17): at Bennett’s ecological
sensibility. While the final scene reaches its climax with Macfarlane’s realisation “that [his
son] will die,” emphatically representing a more or less covert plea to consider “the
generations that succeed us,” the self-evident presence of nonhuman matters, co-
inhabiting and co-forming the universe with nonhuman beings, underscores how his
urgent question (after Jonas Salk) whether we are “being good ancestors” refers to “the
epochs and species that will come after ours,” too (Underland 425, 410). The intricacies of
translating such an all-inclusive ethos into action, or, even before that, into a consistent
ethical framework, are weighed more nuancedly in Jamie’s work.
Kathleen Jamie: Complicating Matters
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Perhaps not as widely known as Macfarlane, the Scottish poet and essayist
Kathleen Jamie nevertheless counts amongst the leading voices of the NNW, having
published a number of award-winning collections of both poetry and essays that seek “to
capture a sense of nature as the interweaving of human and non-human relationships”
(“Rethinking” 17). While Macfarlane’s early work remains somewhat conservative in both
style and settings, Laura Severin contends that Jamie already starts “to escape the
centripetal force of past environmental narratives” with Findings (2005), her first
collection of naturalist essays (101). Indeed, several critics have commented on her
incorporation of a “plurality of perspectives” (Marland, 9; also see “Rethinking” and
Dziok) that helps “to form a universal image of nature,” including nonhuman as well as
human beings, the inside as well as the outside of human bodies (Dziok 18). So
contemplates Jamie upon her visit of the “Surgeon’s Hall” in Edinburgh’s Royal College of
Surgeons, where she examines human specimens and body parts in glass jars, most of
them marked by disease: “[w]e consider the natural world as ‘out there’, an ‘environment’,
but these objects in their jars show us the forms concealed inside, the intimate unknown”
(Findings 141). But “[i]n explaining our innate sameness with the rest of nature,” Lilley
argues, Jamie still “takes care to maintain attention to our difference,” recognising our
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concurrent sameness with, and otherness to the nonhuman natural world (“Rethinking”
22; also see Severin). This is a recognition reminiscent of Barad’s “difference amidst
relationality,” to borrow Adrian Tait’s term, and in fact, Jamie’s exploration of “the porous
margins between culture and nature, human and non-human worlds,” as Alexander puts
it (10), has explicitly been linked to the new materialisms. 6 Following Pippa Marland,
Jamie’s work, and the NNW in general show, in their imaginative, non-apocalyptic
engagement with “nature”, a potentiality to articulate new materialist thought (3)—a
potentiality that we have already seen fulfilled in Macfarlane’s Underland.
Jamie’s and Macfarlane’s approaches have, despite their initial differences,
effectively moved closer towards each other, in particular with their respective 2019
books Underland and Surfacing, Jamie’s third collection of naturalist essays after Findings
and Sightlines (2012). Of course, differences in tone remain; Macfarlane’s prose continues
to be “less guarded” and “more expansive” (Moran 56), while Jamie’s is self-conscious and
often ironic: “in the great scheme of things,” she writes in Surfacing, “we’re living through
a warm bank holiday weekend,” contrasting Macfarlane’s impassioned reflections on
anthropogenic global warming with dry wit and a matter-of-fact attitude that is typical of
her writing (3). Still, it seems nearly uncanny how close the two authors have converged
with their recent books: both make explicit references to the Anthropocene; both engage
with Inuit cultures; both explore Neolithic cave paintings; and both even end with a nearly
identical setting: a walk through a local wood. However, considering that both Underland
and Surfacing have been published in a time where the concept of the Anthropocene
continues to seep into public consciousness, the apparent uncanniness of these
similarities slowly dissolves into thin, carbon-rich air. They can much rather be read as a
more general, and perhaps even unavoidable response of nature writing to the
omnipresence of the Anthropocene; a response that involves a widening of scales, both
spatially and temporally, but nevertheless maintains the endeavour to “[pick] out the
Vol 12, No 2
hidden detail in the everyday, to illuminate what is overlooked” (“Rethinking” 18), not
fully abandoning but rather broadening Cowley’s initial conceptualisation of the NNW.
And yet Jamie’s interpretation of our entanglement with the nonhuman world
differs from Macfarlane’s in other ways than simply matters of style, particularly
regarding the negotiation of the ethical implications of the new materialist perspective
they have begun to share. As I have already touched upon, and as has been noted by
several critics, Jamie recognises the human body, “our own intimate, inner natural world”
(Sightlines 24), as an integral part of “nature” (Alexander 10; Dziok 18; “Rethinking” 21;
Severin 103). With this recognition comes an awareness of the natural ephemerality of
our own being; of the human body’s continuous exposure to death and disease, a theme
that is woven into all three of Jamie’s collections of naturalist essays (see “Fever” and
“Surgeon’s Hall” in Findings; “Pathologies” in Sightlines; “Surfacing”, “A Tibetan Dog”, and
“Elders” in Surfacing). It is in her essay “Pathologies”, involving her visit to a pathology lab
after the death of her mother, where she moves closest to the very nature of human
disease: examining tumours and infections, “colons and livers and hearts,” Jamie observes
6 See Barad’s chapter on what she terms “agential realism” (pp. 132-185).
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“the bacteria that can pull the rug from under us” – the “[n]ature we’d rather do without”
(Sightlines 40; 24; 36). Referring to “our guts as jungles of bacterial flora, our skins as
blooming fantastically with fungi,” Macfarlane similarly points out that encountering
ourselves as multi-species beings happens “not always comfortably or pleasantly”
(Underland 104). But while he quickly goes on to speak of humans as “collaborative
compound organisms,” foreshadowing his sympathy towards the idea of a mutually
beneficial Symbiocene (Underland 104), Jamie halts at this inclusive definition of nature.
If all organic matters are part of the nature “we [are] exhorted to reconnect with,” as she
repines after attending a conference “about humanity’s relationship with other species,”
what about the intrinsic value of bacteria and viruses, then? (Sightlines 23, 22) “What are
vaccinations for,” Jamie ponders, “if not to make a formal disconnection from some of
these wondrous other species?” (Sightlines 23) What are these “other species,” what is
this “nature” we seek to protect? What, exactly, counts worthy of so-called protection and
reconnection? “I wondered,” Jamie writes, “if there was a distinction somewhere I simply
failed to understand” (Sightlines 24). Her feeling of forlornness, of helplessness, in a way,
poignantly illustrates the difficulty of putting a non-anthropocentric approach, dismissing
human superiority and hence their entitlement to greater ethical consideration, into a
consistent ethical framework. “[T]he becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter,”
Barad writes (185), but then concludes “with an all too brief discussion” (in Tait’s words)
what an ensuing ethical approach, including both human and nonhuman beings, could
entail. As Bergthaller notes, the new materialisms tend to “merely [beg] the question how
exactly […] human value and human agency are to be weighed on the onto-ethical scales,”
without providing a clear answer. Jamie’s essay “Pathologies” joins the ongoing search for
a cogent resolution, alluding that the multi-species relationships Macfarlane imagines
may likely struggle to fulfil their aspiration to be “reciprocally beneficial” (Underland 97).
In her more recent essay “In Quinhagak”, published in Surfacing, Jamie shifts her
Vol 12, No 2
focus to human lives and traditions, bringing forward a version of Val Plumwood’s
conceptual vegetarianism that could perhaps be read as a more general model for life in
tune with the nonhuman natural world. Upon her visit of a Yup’ik excavation site in
Alaska, she comes to know the contemporary Yup’ik culture, too. “Living off the land,” as
Darren, one of the natives, puts it, the lives of the indigenous people are still entangled
with the land and its nonhuman inhabitants; their “culinary year” is organised through
the natural cycles of “the land and sea and river,” through hunting and fishing and berry
picking according to the seasons (Surfacing 22, 63). But as the Anthropocene has
invariably changed the landscapes of Kulusuk Island, where Macfarlane experiences age-
old traditions like hunting “under threat of erasure” (Underland 335), climate change is
similarly felt in the lives of the Yup’ik people: “winter was bad,” Darren recalls. “Same last
year too. And then April, May, June were too hot” (Surfacing 22). What shimmers through
the text is a certain nostalgia for a time before anthropogenic climate change, for “a time
when the Yup’ik were hunter-gatherers and fended for themselves, when they did just
fine” (Surfacing 18). How does this fit in a new materialist perspective, when their “doing-
just-fine” involves the killing of nonhuman animal beings, lifting the wellbeing of the
human species above that of others? Not an explicitly materialist theorist herself (likely
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because her writings appeared before the rise of the new materialisms), Plumwood
argues that, while continuing to “[reject] human-centered assumptions of mastery over
animals,” “we can still justify well-contextualized forms of vegetarianism” – forms that
include, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, a contextually justified consumption of
animals as well (298). She contends that “the successful human occupation of many places
and ecological situations in the world has required the use of at least some of their animals
for food and other purposes,” naming “places like the high Arctic regions, where for much
of the year few vegetable resources are available,” as “[t]he most obvious examples”
(305). Rather than shipping or flying in resources from other parts in the world and, in
the process, further stressing the Earth’s ecological system, the use of locally available
foods appears as the “more” ethical choice in Plumwood’s model, even if it includes the
harming of some of this system’s participants. Jamie links this “use” to tradition and,
above all, to subsistence, as opposed to, for example, “sports fishing” that is associated
with “anglers from the southern USA” (Surfacing 44). It is hence a model that allows the
sacrifice of individual beings for the sake of the survival of a species, putting the value of
a whole species and, by extension, the ecosystem, of which we are all integrally part, above
that of the individual. In this way, Jamie’s take holds evident similarities to an ecocentric
perspective, which foregrounds “the intrinsic value in ecosystems” rather than that of
individual entities (Gray, Whyte and Curry 130). Thinking back to Barad’s account of the
world in its “ongoing reconfiguring,” arguing that “[e]xistence is not an individual affair”
but emerges through “entangled intra-relating,” it is a take that appears very much in line
with new materialist thought (338, ix).
But the all-pervasive human impact through ongoing globalisation processes that
are part of the Anthropocene affects such subsistence cultures, too, as Jamie’s experiences
in Quinhagak show, underscoring once more the intricacies of integrating this ecocentric,
and new materialist perspective into an ethical framework. While still “living off the land”
Vol 12, No 2
to a certain extent, the Yup’ik people have not been spared from modernisation; they have
become “[h]unter-gatherers with a grocery store,” as Jamie ironically puts it (Surfacing
32), smoking Marlboro (79) and watching Netflix (90). Such implications of a globalised
world reach deep into age-old tradition, for instance changing the preparation of Yup’ik
food. When a local girl tells Jamie that she will make akutaq—“eskimo ice cream,” as she
explains—Jamie asks what kind of fat is used to prepare it: “‘Seal fat?’ [The girl] pulled a
face. ‘No, something we buy from the store’ (Surfacing 43). This example touches upon an
important point raised by Tait, namely that an ecocentric perspective “requires us to
identify what humans themselves need (as opposed to want or demand), and how those
needs might be balanced against the earth’s needs.” If there are alternative resources
available, the question arises whether it can truly be justified to hunt animals for food,
and because it is tradition; after all, the locals do not “need” the hunted animals to survive,
and traditions “need” to be adapted “to take account of new contexts,” as Plumwood
herself has argued (306). But demanding of an indigenous culture that is part of “the
precariat of a volatile, fast warping planet,” to put it in Macfarlane’s words (Underland
335), to give up on age-old traditions while the Western world continues to emit a much
larger amount of greenhouse gases, picking at their not-even-vegan meals, clearly appears
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too short-sighted. “We can’t go on like this,” Jamie states in a later chapter of Surfacing,
adding: “but we wouldn’t go back either” (156). Reinvigorating hunter-gatherer traditions
is no more an option than continuing to disrupt the Earth System at the unprecedented
pace that is happening today, producing agential forces that lie far beyond human control.
Contemporary nature writing shows that these ubiquitous implications of the
Anthropocene have made it virtually inevitable to imagine this interdependent system as
fundamentally material and co-constitutive. Now it is high time to imagine new, more
inclusive ways of living, as Macfarlane has already begun to do, and to formulate a clear
ethical framework that helps to make such “new ways” possible, as Jamie’s work urgently
expresses.
Conclusion
We have seen how the immeasurable scale of the Anthropocene with its enormous
implications has influenced contemporary nature writing, too, namely in a way that seeks
to do justice to both the interplay of human and nonhuman agencies, and to the immensity
of this scale itself. And still, zooming in on everyday encounters with “nature” in all its
forms, with that what often remains overlooked, seems necessary to comprehend our
entanglement in this more-than-human world; to create an intimacy towards nonhuman
matters that emphasises their intrinsic value. Bennett has argued that such “moments of
sensuous enchantment with the everyday world” (referring to “that strange combination
of delight and disturbance” rather than moments of rapture) may provide the necessary
motivational force that leads humans “to the actual practice of ethical behaviors” (xi).
Macfarlane’s engagement with fungal networks shows how this “sensuous enchantment”
may encourage an envisioning of new, more inclusive forms of living; Jamie’s work
portends that it remains unclear what, and whom “the actual practice of ethical behaviors”
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could effectively entail. Perhaps this is the reason why she is, outside an academic circle,
not quite as often referred to as Macfarlane: because, just as the new materialisms
themselves, she “offers no single, obvious, commanding answer,” to put it into Tait’s
words; “no new dogma, no straightforward rallying cry around which to gather a new
form of radical environmental activism”. But instead of lapsing into resignation at the
sight of all those unanswered questions, she urges us to go on, to keep looking—“because
if you don’t look, you don’t see” (Surfacing 95). Or, as Jamie puts it in Surfacing’s last
chapter, where she finds herself “lost in the wood”: “[t]he path is at your feet, see? Now
carry on” (245). Similarly, we need to carry on along the path towards new
understandings of this ever-changing world; of this web of relations we are intricately
part of. Both Macfarlane and Jamie spur us on to move towards such new ways of thinking,
even if these ways are sometimes not pleasant or comfortable, and this is what makes
their work so necessary in these uncertain times of the Anthropocene.
Submission received 14 January 2020 Revised version accepted 9 May 2021
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Author: Guanio-Uluru, Lykke Title: Embodying Environmental Relationship: A Comparative Ecocritical
Analysis of Journey and Unravel
Embodying Environmental Relationship:

A Comparative Ecocritical Analysis of Journey and Unravel
Lykke Guanio-Uluru
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway
[email protected]
Abstract
Departing from Jane Suzanne Carroll’s contention that “Landscapes are at once geographical and
historical, natural and cultural, experienced and represented, and present a spatial interface between
human culture and physical terrain” (2), this article draws on game studies (Aarseth; Sicart; Yee; Isbister)
and on discussions of game design (Schell; Chen; Sahlin) to analyse the landscape and avatar design of
Journey and Unravel. Developing the term semiotic register as an analytical lens, the article seeks to pin-
point the means by which the two games move the player to adopt distinctly different attitudes and
relationships to the games’ natural scenes. The article starts by positioning the study in relation to previous
ecocritical analyses of games (Backe; Bianchi; Bohunicky; Chang; Lehner; Parham) and by discussing some
aspects of indirect player management before analysing and comparing the two games in more detail.
Keywords: Ecocritical game analysis, game design, semiotic register, player-to-landscape relationship,
embodiment.
Resumen
Alejándose de la afirmación de Suzanne Carroll de que “Los paisajes son al mismo tiempo
geográficos e históricos, naturales y culturales, experimentados y representados, y presentan una interfaz
Vol 12, No 2
espacial entre la cultura humana y el terreno físico” (2), este artículo se basa en los estudios sobre
videojuegos (Aarseth; Sicart; Yee; Isbister) y en los debates sobre el diseño de videojuegos (Schell; Chen;
Sahlin) para anlizar el diseño de los paisajes y de los avatares de Journey y Unravel. Desarrollando el término
registro semiótico como lente analítica, el artículo busca precisar los medios por los que ambos juegos llevan
al jugador a adoptar actitudes y relaciones con las escenas naturales de los juegos claramente diferentes. El
artículo comienza posicionando el estudio en relación con análisis ecocríticos ya existentes de juegos
(Backe; Bianchi; Bohunicky; Chang; Lehner; Parham) y discutiendo algunos aspectos de la gestión indirecta
del jugador antes de analizar y comparar los dos juegos en más detalle.
Palabras clave: Análisis ecocrítico del juego, diseño de juego, registro semiótico, relación jugador-paisaje,
personificación.
Alenda Y. Chang, who has done ground-breaking work on adapting ecocritical

thinking to the study of games, has found that many games treat game environments and
the representation of natural habitats in an instrumentalist fashion, as is the case in most
resource management games (Playing Nature, The Virtual 9), where the player, via the
avatar, harvests and modifies the environment in accordance with player needs. This
design is in alignment with the Western cultural tendency to privilege the human over
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other life forms (anthropocentrism), a principle well known from ecocritical discussions
of artistic and mediated representations of natural landscapes and the environment in
other media. However, some videogames display the potential of games to invite play that
questions the habitual anthropocentric player-to-environment perspective, as does for
instance Thatgamecompany’s Flower (2009), which effectively positions the player as the
wind on which multi-coloured flower petals dance. As Chang notes: “Unlike most games,
that offer players human, or at least humanoid avatars, Flower destabilizes not only player
corporeality but also player agency and perspective” (Playing Nature: Ecology 33). The
novel player perspective in Flower is part of a deliberate and long-term strategy by
Thatgamecompany’s lead designer Jenova Chen to broaden the emotional palette
available through gaming (“Designing Journey”, “From Journey”).
Calling for new kinds of gameplay challenges that are more ecologically aware,
Chang holds that game designers “tend to lean heavily on clichéd landscapes, abandoning
any attempts at regional specificity for pre-patterned and ultimately generic scenes” and
that game design more generally “have yet to develop more sophisticated rules for
interaction between players and game environments” (“Playing Nature” 9). Both Journey
(Thatgamecompany) and Unravel (Coldwood Interactive) are interesting objects of
analysis in this regard, since they undermine the habitual anthropocentric orientation of
the gameplay 1 by reconfiguring the relationship between player and landscape in novel
ways. Both games also foreground natural landscapes in the games’ design. The games’
landscapes differ in style and dimensions, but both games rely on the representation of
natural features to manage player emotion, while exerting narrative control over the
player’s perspective to orient the player in a specific relationship to the games’ natural
scenes.
Departing from Jane Suzanne Carroll’s contention that “Landscapes are at once
geographical and historical, natural and cultural, experienced and represented, and
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present a spatial interface between human culture and physical terrain” (2), this article
draws on game studies (Aarseth; Sicart; Yee; Isbister) and on discussions of game design
(Schell; Chen; Sahlin) to analyse the landscape and avatar design of Journey and Unravel.
Developing the term semiotic register as an analytical lens, the article seeks to pin-point
the means by which the two games move the player to adopt distinctly different attitudes
and relationships to the games’ natural scenes. The article starts by positioning the study
in relation to previous ecocritical analyses of games (Backe; Bianchi; Bohunicky; Chang;
Lehner; Parham) and by discussing some aspects of indirect player management before
analysing and comparing the two games in more detail.
Ecocritical Game Design
There is a long-honed understanding within the field of ecocriticism that artistic

representations of nature and the environment are mediated expressions coloured by
1 Gameplay here refers to “the game dynamics emerging from the interplay between rules and game
geography” (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 127).
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human interests and mental figures. From an initial, literary emphasis on nature writing
and romantic poetry, the field has developed to include a broader engagement with all
types of artworks and environments, including urban and artificial landscapes (Slovic). In
2012, Greg Garrard offered “the widest definition of the subject of ecocriticism [as] the
study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout cultural history
and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself” (5), thus including the theoretical
advances of the posthuman debate in his conception of ecocriticism. More recently, Donna
Haraway’s arguments for an understanding of interspecies relationships as entangled
forms of becoming through kinship (When Species; Staying with) has further refined the
material orientation of the field.
Ecocritical perspectives have transference value to game studies, providing that
they are appropriately framed in media specific ways. Drawing on Haraway, Melissa
Bianchi has argued for instance, that the play mechanics of Octodad: Dadliest Catch (Young
horses) and Nintendo’s Splatoon, which require that the player navigates as cephaloid
characters, enable players “to not only think alternative kinships, but also enact making
them” (141). She further suggests that the challenge of working the unfamiliar controls of
Octodad, which forces the player to control one or two of his tentacles at once, with a
constant need to switch between tentacles to accomplish what to humans are simple
tasks, “simulates the challenge of understanding the non-human” (63).
While interesting work has been done, there is still a need for ecocritically
informed game analysis. As noted by Chang and Parham in 2017, “environmental criticism
has been little represented in game studies thus far,” offering as their explanation both an
alleged humanist scepticism towards technology and a perceived “fetishism” of the player
and the act of play on the part of games scholars “in a way that inevitably denigrates game
content and context” (11). Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne have additionally
called for an engagement with climate change in the industry, arguing that “Even a passing
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familiarity with the cultural output of the mainstream game industry reveals the startling
omission of the issue – with very few games telling stories that engage with climate
change and the unfolding ecological crisis” (74). 2 A further reason for the dearth of
environmental engagement within game studies is implicit in Yosef Nguyen’s remark that
such engagement requires a critical awareness of the material conditions of gaming that
potentially interferes with a sense of fun: “If digital games are to contribute to ecological
sustainability, they must be self-reflexive of their participation in ecological harm and
signal to players their complicity in that harm as part of the cost of playing and having
fun” (20). 3
Hans-Joachim Backe has commented that “Ecocriticism of digital games has so far
engaged with a rather small corpus of examples, often prescriptively and with a quite
limited methodological toolkit” (39). Arguably, these shortcomings are rather a result of
the scarcity of the research rather than an indication of the quality of the work
undertaken. According to Backe, attention has clustered at either ends of a spectrum,
2 Phone story (2011) and Little inferno (2012) as discussed by Nguyen are evidence of such engagement.
3 Arguably, this challenge extends to multiple consumerist practices, not only that of playing digital games.
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focussing either on “overtly ecocritical games” or on “negative extremes in the depiction

of the natural environment” (41). How overtly ecocritical a game is may to some extent
be an interpretive issue, as well as a factor of the interpreter’s familiarity with the field of
ecocriticism. While Backe holds that “a certain degree of accuracy in depicting and
simulating the natural environment is essential for games to seriously reflect ecological
issues” (48), Chang contends that “games need not be explicitly environmental to have
important environmental implications” (Playing Nature, The Virtual viii). Backe’s assertion
that an ecocritical study of a game would be pointless if there is no engagement with the
natural environment in the game also seems at odds with the third ecocritical wave that
includes urban landscapes in its field of study. Still, analysing games that simulate natural
environments is an obvious ecocritical starting point and the two games analysed here
both engage with representations of natural landscapes, foregrounding natural features
in the player experience.
The emotional effects of game design have so far been sparingly discussed in the
ecocritical study of games, even as Backe has touched on the ecocritical potential of
designing for complex emotional player experiences. Drawing on Sicart’s (The Ethics)
discussion of ethical game design, Backe locates the ecocritical potential of games in
“dissonances between gameplay and [representational] semiotics” and in the “tension
between game goals and player morals” (46) and argues that games become ethically and
ecologically relevant “if they provoke conflict in players by implementing game goals that
may clash with a player’s extra-ludic values and beliefs” (46).
Without reference to Sicart, Alexander Lehner has demonstrated the ethical and
ecocritical potential of designing for dissonances between gameplay goals and player
ethics in his discussion of the adventure-quest game Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico),
which opens the possibility for ethical gameplay through the inversion of the trope of the
heroic protagonist as the player becomes complicit in the destruction of the natural
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environment, represented in the game in the form of a series of giants, or colossi (66).
While the slaying of the colossi satisfies the game dynamics of heroic play invited by the
game, the lingering depiction of the giants’ demise mixes player triumph over mastering
the requirements of the game with emotions of guilt and regret. Lehner argues that the
“hybrid materiality of fur, stones, and ruins also renders them [the colossi]
representatives of the environment”, so that “the player becomes an invader disturbing
the creatures’ natural habitats and those habitats’ perfectly content inhabitants to fulfil
the narrative premise (i. e. saving the girl)” (67). The game’s undermining of the heroic
reward thus creates an emotionally complex gaming experience, which for some players
takes on an ecocritical dimension.
The configuration of the game environment as hybrid giants of stone that are
ultimately conquered by the player introduces the conception of an agential environment,
that actively resists human appropriation. Kyle Matthew Bohunicky has used the term
agential landscape in an ecocritical analysis of Minecraft (Mojang, 2011), albeit in a
different sense. Discussing the crafting interface in the game, he argues that “the entire
space of Minecraft is a writing technology” and thus that Minecraft models
ecocomposisiton, also in the sense that the game system displays the effects on the in-
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game landscape of the players’ building activities. “Minecraft models an agential nature
that, unlike many digital games, challenges players to develop practices that enable them
to survive within [it],” he holds (226). As will become clear, both Journey and Unravel
engage the player in the experience of moving through agential nature, albeit in a sense
different from that suggested by Bohunicky.
The present article is interested in how Journey and Unravel build meaning
semiotically through the configuration of the player-to-landscape relationship. Sicart’s
distinction between a game’s procedural “core” and its semiotic domain is useful in
unravelling this significance (Beyond Choices). According to Sicart, a game’s semiotic
domain unites “all the metaphors, contexts, and cultural practices that wraps around a
game’s procedural core” and that engages the player by means of “metaphors, audio-
visual elements, and the design and incorporation of interpersonal dynamics into the
activity of play” (Beyond Choices 45). Making Sicart’s term analytically usable, this article
coins the term semiotic register—a term denoting the process by which semiotic signs in
games (including the game mechanics and game interface) compile procedurally to
represent (clusters of) thematic and cultural meaning to the player.
In its analysis of Unravel and Journey, this article further uses the terms “game
space” and “landscape” to denote subcomponents of what Chang calls the “game
environment”, which refers somewhat comprehensively to “the apparent virtual worlds
presented by art and programming, and specifically to those worlds’ ecological
implications” (Playing Nature, The Virtual vi). The more specific terms of game space and
landscape are useful here since the emphasis is on the features of the game landscape
both as representations in the semiotic domain and in the ludic topography “presented by
art and programming” that the player engages with. On the level of programming, this
notion of “game space” builds on Aarseth’s narrative theory of games that discusses game
worlds in terms of the structures: single room, linear corridor, multicursal labyrinth, hub-
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shaped quest landscape and open landscape (“A Narrative” 5). In the semiotic domain,
landscape is here considered specifically as the representation of natural topographies in
the game by aid of metaphors and audio-visual elements, combined with the range of ludic
activities the player is invited to engage in within that landscape, all of which suggest that
the mediated landscapes are also carriers of cultural and symbolic meanings. What the
article seeks to demonstrate is that the player-to-landscape relationship in the two games
is comprised of both thematic and cultural semiotic registers that combine to position the
player in a specific relationship to, and with a particular attitude towards, the games’
landscape features. Before moving on to the analysis of landscape and avatar design in
Journey and Unravel, a brief discussion of game design is helpful.
Player Management Through Indirect Control
In a Game UX Summit’19 keynote, Chen argues that while the film industry offers
a wide range of emotional experiences through established genres, the output of the game
industry has so far tended to offer its players a limited emotional spectrum of vicarious
experience and one that is dominated by what Chen terms “strong and primal” emotions
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(“From Journey”). The game industry would be emotionally healthier if it could develop
games that cater to a wider emotional bandwidth, he argues, such as genuinely romantic
games, family games, and games with significant dramas developed through gameplay.
Focusing on providing their players with feelings of empowerment, designers have
catered in particular to the emotional desires of juvenile players, whose power and
influence may be restricted in real life, Chen notes. The design of Journey grew from Chen’s
own search for games that might provide different, and more mature, kinds of emotional
experience, of which he found very few (“Designing Journey”).
In line with Chen, Katherine Isbister (2017) argues that games are “intentionally
designed emotional experience” and discusses the “building blocks” of such emotional
design (1). She emphasises meaningful choices, flow, social emotions, avatars, non-player
characters and character customization, but surprisingly does not discuss the potential of
sound and music to emotionally affect the player as one of her “building blocks” of
emotional design (even if she intermittently comments on the effects of music in
individual games). Suzanne K. Langer has argued that “music is the morphology of feeling”
(8) and Chen remarks that Journey was moulded around the musical theme composed by
Austin Wintory and that he generally develops his games by first prototyping music
because “music is the most effective and powerful medium that can create emotions”
(“Designing Journey”). The lead designer of Unravel, Martin Sahlin (2019), also cites a
piece of music as the inspirational starting point for the game, namely Björk’s “Unravel”,
which has the following opening lines: “While you are away my heart comes undone,
slowly unravels in a ball of yarn, I will collect it with a grin”– a line representative of the
game’s mechanics.
Both games were designed with the emotional quality of the game experience in
mind. According to Chen, with Journey he aimed to “induce positive emotion between two
strangers online”, causing genuine social bonding, while making sure the game could still
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be played as a single-player game (“Designing Journey”). Sahlin notes that Unravel was
designed to create a feeling of “genuine, deep joy”, after he realised that his games were
reaching an extensive audience and started thinking more deeply about the meaning and
impact he wanted his games to have.
Videogames, which typically position the player as agent by way of the playable
avatar, and which often are mediations of competitive activities, like sports or war, thus
featuring scores and competitive conditions, lend themselves well to facilitating the
emotion of empowerment (for those who master the game mechanics). Understanding
the emotional rhetoric of empowerment-as-domination as a kind of gaming default-
position helps explain Chang’s observation (Playing Nature: Ecology 9) that the
configuration of the relationship between player and game environment most often is one
where the player is positioned to “master” both the game and the in-game landscape. In
search of a different emotional gaming register, both Journey and Unravel modify this
habitual logic of environmental conquest.
A significant trait of games, as suggested by Espen Aarseth’s term cybertext, is that
they are dynamic “text-machines”, the experience and ordering of which unfolds in
relationship to player input (Cybertext). This means that the player exerts influence over
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the unfolding of game events. From a designer perspective, game experiences are equally
constituted by the range of player options the designer orchestrates for the player. As
Jesse Schell points out, the designer has multiple tools with which to suggest and
constrain player behaviour, using both direct (or “forced”) and more indirect (cognitive
and psychological) means:
If a clever designer can make a player feel free, when really the player has very few choices,
or even no choice at all, then suddenly we have the best of both worlds, the player has the
wonderful feeling of freedom, and the designer has managed to economically create an
experience with an ideal interest curve and an ideal set of events. (343)
The “clever designer” might accomplish this through the use of what Schell terms “indirect
control methods”, such as limiting player choice, establishing goals that directs player
activity, or through visual design that directs the players’ line of sight, carefully guiding
them through the level without seemingly exerting any form of control. As in film, music
and sound may powerfully affect players’ emotions, but only in games can they affect the
player’s movement and action. Unique to gaming is also the design of the virtual interface,
which is another such indirect control method: “If a player controls a human adventurer,
they will try to do certain things. If they control a dragonfly, an elephant, or a Sherman
tank, they will try to do very different things” (346). Thus, indirect control works mainly
by suggesting certain things to the player, that the player, often subconsciously, accepts.
Positioning the Player as Avatar
The player avatar determines the player’s modes of interaction with the game
environment. It positions the player in a specific relationship to this environment, not
least through the range of actions and interactions it permits the player to engage in.
Avatar design thus comes with ecocritical implications. Rune Klevjer has discussed how
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the player becomes intuitively attuned to the environment through which the playable
avatar moves.
When we play, because the avatar extends the body rather than pure agency or subjectivity,
screen space becomes a world that we are subjected to, a place we inhabit and where we
struggle for survival. We learn to intuitively judge, like we do in the real world, the
opportunities and dangers of the environment. (13)
As the embodiment of the player’s agency in the game world, the avatar positions the
player in that world, not only kinaesthetically but also psychologically. The avatar is the
player’s environmental stand-in.
Both Journey and Unravel make use of other-than-human avatars to reshape the
habitual gaming rhetoric of anthropocentric mastery. The avatar in Unravel is a robed
figure with a head band and luminous eyes. Its orange robes and long flowing scarf are
suggestive of a Tibetan monk (an interpretation strengthened by the gongs and chanting
in the opening soundtrack). While the figure is humanoid, its shape is highly stylised.
Significantly, it has no arms and thus cannot grab or hold onto anything. Consequently,
the player cannot make use of the landscape in any common, human way, excepting the
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avatar’s ability to walk. The avatar has no power of speech but communicates through
sounding a musical note that may activate in-game information and rewards.
The avatar in Unravel, Yarny, is a tiny stick figure wrapped in red yarn, reminiscent
of a child’s toy. Much of its expressiveness comes from its ability to blink. Sahlin notes that
the designer team worked to convey emotion through movement and body language
rather than speech, and the absence of spoken language is a design feature shared by the
two games. In both games, the avatars apparently have few biological requirements and
consequently do not need to harvest the landscape in any materialist sense. In Journey,
some biological constraints are signalled by the fact that the avatar can perish in the snow,
while in Unravel, the need to breathe is simulated since Yarny may drown. These
biological features are significant in that they cause potential interruptions in the player’s
advancement in the game. Both avatars are, in principle, gender neutral.
Additionally, both games modify the habitual player-to-landscape relationship by
making the avatar small in relation to the natural environment: according to Chen, he was
going for “a sense of small” like the feeling of an astronaut in space (“Designing Journey”).
Yarny is even smaller. The core of the art direction in Unravel, Sahlin says, was pursuing
the idea that there is beauty in everything if you just look closely enough at ordinary
things in a mindful way. The small scale of Yarny and its slow pace facilitate this
mindfulness since the avatar comes up very close to things and linger by them. Isbister
notes that the technique of shooting at close range creates the illusion of intimacy
between the character and viewer and will “amplify identification with the virtual people
and situations” (7). Yarny’s tiny size brings the player close to the naturalistic scenery in
the game and position her in a different relationship to ordinary objects.
According to Isbister, immersion happens as players project themselves into
playable avatars on four levels: the visceral, cognitive, social and fantasy levels (11). On
the visceral level, the strength and skill accumulated by the player in the game is reflected
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in the virtual body of the avatar. Undercutting the rhetoric of dominance, both Journey
and Unravel downplay the visceral level of player experience. In Journey, the most readily
visible token of avatar experience is that the avatar’s scarf grows longer and can hold
more energy as the player progresses through the game. In Unravel, the avatar unravels
as it moves through the game world and constantly must collect new bundles of yarn
along the way. Other than that, the avatar does not viscerally change in the course of
gameplay (apart from turning white in the snow). Player experience and progress is
marked by Yarny’s collection of a series of crocheted yarn figures, representing old
memories, that it sticks on the cover of an old photo album. Both games thus de-
emphasize the rhetoric of competition that usually makes the visceral level significant to
the gaming experience.
On the cognitive level of gameplay, certain strategies and actions are rewarded
over others (Isbister 11). Unravel, as a physics-based puzzle platformer, rewards
cognitive puzzle solving, where the player makes use of physical objects in the game
world. For instance, in an early puzzle the player-as-Yarny must collect apples to drop in
an empty well, before pulling a lever to fill the well with water, in order to ride across the
watery expanse on the floating apples. Each stage in the procedural logic of this sequence
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must be figured out by the player. Journey tasks the player with landscape traversal,
exploration, and the collection of luminous pieces of cloth. The reward of collecting the
cloth is the ability to fly rather than walk across the landscape. In places, flying is
necessary for player advancement.
The social level of avatar projection is inhabiting the avatar’s social persona to try
out social qualities the player may not normally possess (11). In Unravel, this social level
consists of encounters Yarny has along the way with various insects and animals, such as
being carried through the air in the beak of a magpie and chased underground by a
lemming – all “social encounters” than a human would not be able to have except
vicariously through Yarny. Unravel thus explicitly encourages encounters with flora and
fauna in ways that depart from a habitual human viewpoint.
In the game’s online mode, the players of Journey can sound their notes to each
other and boost each other’s energy through proximity, thus making progression through
the game easier for both – a dynamic that for many players facilitate deeply touching
experiences of community, cast against the austere and sometimes forbidding desert
environment. These three design levels work together to “allow the player to explore
alternate fantasy selves though actual in-game performance”, providing a “fantasy level”
of experience (13). In both Journey and Unravel, this “fantasy level” allows the player to
experience a (compressed) life-journey, from a perspective where the avatar is dwarfed
by the landscape.
Chang has touched on how sprawling game worlds may render the player
character a negligible entity, noting that in terms of player relationship to the
environment “it matters whether we play as small, middling, or large entities” (Playing
Nature: Ecology 69). However, she says little about the psychological mechanisms
underpinning the effects of avatar scale, which may be explained with reference to
experimental studies conducted by Nick Yee into the psychological effect of avatar
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appearance. In a study, conducted with Bateson, testing whether a taller avatar made
players more confident, they found that players with such avatars tended to make higher
bids in their own favour, indicating a sense of self confidence (and also, perhaps, an
impulse of greed unchecked by humility) (Yee 151). Yee holds that even “subtle
manipulations in avatar appearance have dramatic effects on how people interact with
each other in virtual worlds. And these effects occur rapidly, fewer than sixty seconds
after being in a new digital body” (152). Yee and Bateson further found that the effect of
the avatar identification was carried forward into the participants’ subsequent real-world
choices (153), even if they fail to say anything about the duration of the effect.
Based on this research, the design choice of dwarfing the avatar in relationship to
the natural landscape and thus to situate the player in a humbler position relative to it,
potentially induces a sense of respect for the natural world that is absent from more
anthropocentric game design. Arguably, the device of dwarfing the avatar is also used to
great effect in Shadow of the Colossus, where the landscape is represented by the colossi
that the player participates in destroying. Because Shadow of the Colossus simultaneously
retains the drive towards dominance common to battle games, there is a clash of
emotional registers that the player experiences as unease.
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Given the powerful psychological effects of changes in avatar appearance, the

design choice in both Journey and Unravel of not allowing for avatar customisation
consequently enables the designers to retain a tighter emotional control over the game
experience – a degree of control that is important as both games aim to shape player
emotion through design. Yee and Bateson’s findings indicate that when players “learn to
intuitively judge” the opportunities and dangers of the in-game environment (Klevjer 13)
through virtual embodiment, they are simultaneously shaped by their experiences in the
game in a manner that may not be conscious.
However, while both games dwarf their avatars to foreground natural landscapes
in the gaming experience, the gameplay of the two games requires the player to adopt
widely different attitudes towards, and relationships with, these natural environments.
One difference lies along the axis of aesthetic engagement, since both games invite
aesthetic experiences of landscape: where, due to the scale and barrenness of the
environment, Journey leans towards the sublime, 4 Unravel, given its attention to tiny
natural detail and picturesque vistas, rather deals in the beautiful (Burke). More
significantly, the games invite the player to embody different relationships to landscape
in an agential sense, that is, in terms of the range of actions they afford the player through
the playable avatar. Thus, the games’ construction of landscape relies on what I here term
their semiotic registers, made up of the procedural compilation of semiotic signs into
clusters of cultural meaning. I will exemplify what is meant by the concept of semiotic
registers in the following.
Journey—Landscape as Abstraction
The ludo-topographic structure of Journey is close to Aarseth’s unicursal labyrinth

(Farca 5), since the game has a linear route to a final destination (Aarseth’s linear corridor,
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“A Narrative”) but includes “larger multicursal areas for exploration and task fulfilment”
(Farca 11). This narrative structure invites the player to alternately linger in the
landscape and progress toward the “destination”: the top of a distant mountain. The
player is guided in her navigation through visual cues in the landscape, where the
traversal of sand dunes and the exploration of half-buried ruins provide points of interest.
Thus, the game smoothly guides player attention through seamless visual design,
accomplished in large part by stripping the game environment of visual distractions so
that the game’s landscape features implicitly guide and direct player attention.
In the design of Journey, Chen sought to instil environmental awe in the player by
pitting the avatar in a vast, barren desert landscape. He also modelled the game
experience to replicate the emotional curve of what Joseph Campbell terms the archetypal
hero’s journey (“Designing Journey”). In the game, this emotional curve is created by
4In a discussion of Journey, Parham describes the game as “a genuine and complex green representation”
and as “Encapsulating just about all of the elements by which [Timothy] Morton describes the ambience of
dark ecology,” albeit combined with “the tempering influence of the sublime” (228).
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managing player emotion so that, from the mellow beginning, there is a rise of intensity
towards the game’s end, giving the player a sense of catharsis through transformation.
Player emotion is managed both through visual design, through navigational flow and not
least by aid of sound effects and visual symbolism.
The opening cut-scene of the game presents several of these semiotically
significant elements. The game environment is first introduced through the sound of a
whistling wind. As the image gradually dissolves into a vista of glittering desert sand, the
sound of gongs and a brief chord of vocals blend with a wistful cello, which accompanies
a cut to a pyramidal sand dune, the sun visible behind it. A close-up of the hazy sun blends
into a camera pan across a series of tomb-like structures emerging amidst the wind-swept
desert sand. As a luminous object falls from the sky, there is a musical crescendo following
the luminous object as it races across the sand, before the point of view comes to an abrupt
halt and the avatar rises into the frame in the open desert landscape. From that moment,
the player is in control of the avatar, which may be moved in any direction in the vast
landscape, where the eerie half-buried ruins attract player attention. At game’s end, the
avatar merges back into the light, suggesting that its life cycle is complete—a narrative
arc underscoring the game’s spiritual symbolism: the avatar returns into the light—only
to begin the journey again.
Making use of stripped-down and stylised landscape features, Journey leads its
player to continuously engage with a series of archetypal symbols, several of which are
introduced in the opening cut-scene: the sun, the stars, the desert, temples, light, and a
towering mountain. The gameplay repetitively sends the player avatar though narrow
passages, over tall bridges and though gates, all symbolising initiation. At times, the player
perspective is locked, in cut scenes, as the avatar rushes though narrow tracts in the
landscape. The lack of any in-world flora or fauna underlines the abstract nature of the
scenery.
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The “spiritual” quality of the game reported by many players is semiotically
developed both through the soundtrack (featuring gongs and chanting), the visuals
(where light guides player advancement) and though the walking and gliding movement
of the avatar in the deliberate staging of an archetypal journey, embodied as a series of
symbolic acts. At intervals, cut scenes show the avatar assuming a meditational pose to
receive “guidance” from taller, higher order beings that enable advancement in the game.
The spiritual or otherworldly quality of the gameplay is enhanced by the avatar’s ability
to lift off the ground and fly, powered by light accumulated in its scarf, further underlining
the disembodied and symbolic nature of the journey. The luminous “codes” or glyphs
collected by the avatar to “power” its scarf contributes to the mood of “mystery and awe”
that Chen was seeking to convey. Thus, the player of Journey is invited to “soar above” the
landscape and, being unable to physically touch anything, engages in what is at times an
other-than-human embodied experience, given that humans are physically unable to fly.
In this manner, a range of evocative semiotic elements combine in suggestive ways
into a semiotic register that denotes a spiritual journey—a unity of meaning accentuated
through the archetypal natural forms of the game and the game’s sublime aesthetics, as
well as through the explorative nature of the gameplay, revolving around the mysterious
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and “alien” ruins encountered in the landscape. Thus, while the game’s natural forms are
predominantly represented as cross-cultural, archetypal symbols, contributing to the
game’s thematic semiotic register, which hints that the gamer is undertaking an inner
journey, the semiotic signs representing the journey’s spiritual quality combines into a
register suggestive of Asian culture: the robe clad monk, the chanting, the “prayer flags”
dispersed in the landscape, the avatar’s meditational pose, the temple gates at journey’s
end and the cyclical pattern of the journey itself, alluding to the Buddhist concept of
reincarnation.
While Journey’s opening scene indicates the cosmic scope of the game’s implied
space, it also introduces the concept of death and ruin; a series of murals that the player
activates while progressing through the game tells the story of the rise and fall of a great
civilisation now buried under the desert sand, the ruins of which the player encounters in
the landscape. The murals depict a civilizational trajectory of increasing mechanisation,
followed by an overuse of available resources that eventually leads to the civilisation’s
downfall. This environmental backstory lies hidden and must be excavated by the player
through the pleasurable, flowing gameplay, thus exemplifying the kind of ecocritical
awareness called for by Ngyen (2017), since embedded in the pleasure of gameplay there
lies hidden a message of player complicity (given the resource requirements of gaming
hardware use and production) in an energy- demanding practice that in the long run
contributes to ecological harm.
While there is a degree of verisimilitude in the mediation of the avatar’s
movements in the desert landscape in that the game controls give the player a
kinaesthetic sense of its movement through the sand, the avatar’s momentum in the game
world does not comply with the laws of physics: When the avatar moves uphill, the
controller vibrates with resistance and movement is slower and more grinding, while
sliding downhill induces a sense of flow, but this is not how sand naturally behaves, as it
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would arrest downward movement. Thus, the flowing movement of the sand is part of the
game’s “fantasy level” (Isbister) of experience. “We tried to capture realism” Chen says,
“but we tried to capture the realism that we wished” (“Designing Journey”).
The meditative, flowing state of the gameplay is encouraged through the soothing
music, the sounds of the avatar’s flapping robe and the rushing sounds of sand and wind,
kinaesthetically combined with the walking, sliding or floating progression of the avatar
through the visually “clean” landscape. Since the avatar lacks arms, the player can only
interact with the landscape by moving through it, feeling and seeing the effects of the
wind, sand and sun. The natural landscape does not respond to the note sounded by the
avatar, as do fellow travellers and the temple structures (by lighting up). The game thus
positions the player as the receiver of an at times agential landscape, where, in places,
showers of cascading sand or fierce winds prevent player advancement, suggesting the
immensity of natural forces, while at the same time acting as barriers of avatar
advancement, directing the player along the game’s linear corridor of game narration. The
game’s strict narrative control, enforced not least through the game’s environmental
elements, imbues the player with a sense of ultimately not having any genuine control
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over the “destiny” the game portrays, but of being moved along by forces greater than her
own—an at times humbling environmental experience.
Unravel—A Sustainable Work Ethic
Unravel too has a backstory that the player must piece together by navigating the
game space as an obstacle course, while gathering mnemonic clues in the game
environment. Dispersed in the various locations in the game are photographic memories
of a Swedish childhood that the player must collect and assemble in a photo album
belonging to an old woman. Player experience and progress is marked by Yarny’s
collection of crocheted yarn figures, and by the compilation and “activation” of the
photographs in the photo album, as they are retrieved from various locations.
Unravel’s opening cut-scene positions the player inside a living room, a camera
tracking towards a grey-haired woman sitting by the dining table in her small cottage. The
soundtrack is a melancholy violin, mixed with the sound of chirping birds. Rising to walk
upstairs, the woman stops to straighten a photograph of a small child on the wall. A ball
of red yarn drops from her knitting basket and rolls under the table, from whence, after a
short fade, Yarny emerges. The tiny yarn-wrapped stick figure climbs unto the table,
passing an embroidered cushion with a Swedish motto that translates: “Happiness grows
from small, simple things”. The cut-scene ends, and the player gains control over Yarny
and may explore the, at first, empty photo album. Following a trajectory through the living
room, the player-as-Yarny then makes her way outside the house through the “portal” of
a photograph and into the woman’s garden. A series of signs connoting childhood makes
up the game’s main thematic register: Yarny’s tiny scale, as well as his shape as a toy, are
indicative of this. Furthermore, the gameplay follows a trajectory where Yarny leaves the
childhood garden, riding a tricycle, to explore the wider landscape, engaging in childhood
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activities like flying a kite.
As Yarny, the player moves along a 2D plane, traversing a “linear corridor” type of
game architecture, while the game’s non-ludic space (Aarseth, “A Narrative” 4) is a 3D
perspectival rendition of beautiful scenery that is not static but alive with wind, waves,
insects, and animal life. This verisimilitude counteracts the games’ 2D movement options
that allow for strict narrative control of player movement. Furthermore, it presents an
environment that is alive, agential, and changing, going through its own (also seasonal)
processes irrespective of Yarny’s individual project. The effect is achieved through the
simulation of a macro photographic perspective, where the depth of field is reduced so
that Yarny stays focussed in the foreground of scenes while the background is slightly
blurred to indicate its remoter position. Thanks to the layering operation of digital media
software (Manovich), the in-game milieu in Unravel is composed of layers that move
independently of each other, providing the natural scenery with an agency seemingly
independent of Yarny’s movements within it.
Yarny’s diminutive size, and his domestic origin, signals a more earth-bound
perspective that Journey’s archetypal and cosmic drama and brings the player close to the
naturalistic settings in the game, as Yarny orients the player in a novel relationship to
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ordinary objects. A lot of the enjoyment in Unravel comes from moving around in and
experiencing the beautifully rendered landscapes of the game world, which are
naturalistic representations of the Swedish countryside, from Yarny’s perspective. The
elaborate construction of the game space, composed of the independent movement of
flora and fauna in different image layers, experienced from Yarny’s close-to-the-ground
perspective, calls attention to minute details, such as strands of wafting grass, the
iridescent petals of flowers, and the cups of individual stems of lichen. Creating the game,
Sahlin made an actual yarn figure using sticks from a Swedish forest that he carried
around and photographed in various natural settings. The musical soundtrack sets the
mood of the different scenes with folk musical motifs that are blended with natural sounds
from the landscapes Yarny moves in and through, such as buzzing insects, running water
and bird calls, contributing to the game’s sense of environmental realism.
In contrast to the actions of the armless avatar in Journey, who must activate
changes in the game environment through sounding its musical note or by moving close
to objects, Yarny’s interaction with the landscape is highly physical and kinaesthetic. The
player must control and time Yarny’s movements as it walks, runs and climbs through the
landscape, frequently pushing or pulling objects to stand on or use as leverage, often
lassoing branches or other types of levers to swing across obstacles along its way. Leaving
few traces in the landscape due to its diminutive size, Yarny thus enacts a kind of self-
sufficiency ethic, drawing on natural resources without using them up. Through this
working relationship with the natural elements, as Yarny traverses the landscape, the
game space shifts for the player from being a represented space, in Buell’s sense, to
becoming a place, imbued with meaning derived from the player’s engagement with
varied landscape features, like trees, dams, caves, hills, the seashore, rivers, and marshes,
all with their unique flora and fauna. The scenery is picturesque, but also treacherous:
Yarny is nearly stepped on by an elk and run over by a car and has its raft crushed by a
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giant fish. While natural beauty is celebrated, Yarny also moves through human debris - a
contrast apt to trigger ecocritical reflection on the human uses and abuses of the natural
environment.
Where Journey’s avatar is framed as a cosmic “alien” journeying through a barren
space, Yarny is quite literally “locally grown”, its organic form derived from the branch of
a tree. Even as the landscapes of both games hold specific cultural memories that the
player must uncover, the player’s activities seem more “at one” with the local
environment in Unravel, since its relation to the landscape is more varied and intimate.
Yarny’s landscape exploration also leads the player through a series of activities grounded
in Scandinavian culture, thus building the game’s cultural semiotic register. From its early
antics in a homely garden, via its forest trekking, fishing and tobogganing, Yarny engages
in a series of typical Scandinavian activities in a series of typically Scandinavian settings.
The local flavour and significance of Yarny’s landscape traversal is underlined by its many
close encounters with local flora and fauna as well as by the cyclical seasonal changes that
are a pronounced feature of Nordic natural landscapes—a signifying of the in-game
landscape that perhaps is most keenly felt by Scandinavian players.
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Yarny’s cultural ties are further highlighted in the gameplay, for instance in the
chapter in which the player must navigate a berry mire, where the game invokes the
practice of cloudberry picking - a rather strenuous exercise, as anyone having undertaken
it will know. The practice underscores the game’s embeddedness in a specific, local
context, since in Scandinavian culture, cloudberries are a treasure so rare they are served
up as a special Christmas treat, not least due to the labour-intensive process of wading
through mosquito infested mires that is required to collect them—a struggle recognizably
replicated in the gameplay of Unravel.
While the avatar in Journey enables the player to see but not touch, Unravel
develops a different semiotic register that places the player in a working relationship to
the game’s natural scenes. This orientation is partly a result of genre, as the player must
work to solve a series of physical puzzles, drawing on natural resources along the way,
but is also developed by way of the game’s settings, which include several (derelict) work
locations, like a mine, a factory, an office, a farm and a garage. Thus, while natural beauty
abounds in Unravel, human culture is represented through human subsistence
industries—all of which are perilous to Yarny’s progression but also significant aspects of
the gameplay.
Concluding Observations
As the article has hoped to demonstrate, emotional game design has led the
creators of both Journey and Unravel to reconfigure the “clichéd landscapes” and “generic
scenes” of commercial game environments, making use of the games’ landscape features
as signs that guide and direct player experience and compile through play into semiotic
registers imbuing the game experience with cultural meaning and significance. While
Journey and Unravel both overall seek to instil pleasant rather than complex emotional
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experiences, both games problematize idyllic player-to-nature relationships through the
incorporation of scenes and game mechanics that question the human use, abuse, and
control of natural resources. On a structural level, the natural landscapes in both games
feature as obstacle courses, directing player traversal and attention, while the cultural
nuances of the in-game landscapes are configured as different semiotic registers. In both
games, natural landscape structures function as a form of cultural repository, imbuing the
player’s obstacle traversal with layers of connotative meaning.
As the in-game landscapes are experienced by the player, the represented natural
elements also become emotional signifiers in the game experience: On a semiotic level it
matters that the forms and structures constituting the game environment invokes non-
human nature. The stylized, archetypal forms making up Journey’s in-game environment
connote an inner journey because of the long-standing human relationship to these forms
and their cumulative cultural significance: the sun, the desert, the wind, and the mountain,
while the intimately detailed natural scenes of Unravel have resonance and poignancy,
perhaps particularly to Scandinavian players, because they are anchored in a specifically
Scandinavian landscape.
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From an ecocritical perspective, the games succeed in re-orienting the players’

relationship to the in-game landscapes, not least by stripping their avatars of human
characteristics, and, significantly, of most of their biological needs. Thus, while Journey
leaves the player humbled in relation to the agential forces of the in-game landscape and
Unravel succeeds in creating a genuinely localized gaming experience, they both manage
this emotional reorientation by silencing human biological requirements. In that sense,
both games represent environmental conduct that the player may not easily adopt in real
life.
Submission received 14 July 2020 Revised version accepted 8 June 2021
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Bohunicky, Kyle Matthew. “Ecocomposition: writing ecologies in digital games”, Green
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Author: Benvegnù, Damiano Title: Editorial
Editorial
Creative Writing and Arts
Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene
Damiano Benvegnù
Dartmouth College, USA
[email protected]
I was born in the Italian Alps but currently live in a rather remote county in the
northeastern region of the USA known as New England. When I walk through forests here,
their apparent state of abandonment surprises me, as they appear to have been left to
themselves, untended by human labor. Yet, this territory has a long history of human
intervention on the environment: for instance, indigenous communities used to
periodically burn parts of the forest, especially those near water, to manage their growth.
More dramatically, those northern Europeans who, famously and likely falsely, landed on
Plymouth Rock in 1620 initiated the westward invasion of America that brought, along
with the genocide of indigenous people, those radical changes in the land so movingly
recounted by William Cronon (Cronon). The new settler-colonial communities imported
a different practice of dwelling that sought to forcefully transform the land into an agro-
pastoral utopia, with very few trees and large pastures (cfr. Wessels). Yet, most of New
England today resembles neither the pre-colonial landscape nor the colonial one, as
forests have reclaimed most of the land and only scattered signs remind us that these
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lands were once tended by communities of humans. The forest floor of contemporary
forests is thus often left in a state of disarray, with a clutter of fallen trees and branches
that does not allow for rapid regrowth. This condition cannot but confound those who,
like myself, come from agro-pastoral cultures and are accustomed to view and interact
with forests in terms of intergenerational obligation: if the forest floor is not tended and
new trees do not have an ideal growing ground, how will the next generation of humans
be able to benefit from the land?
This question about responsibility toward future generations and their “right” to
benefit from trees prompts an inquiry into the potential ecological value of different
human interventions into seemingly abandoned landscapes and interlocks with the
theme of this issue of Ecozon@ devoted to Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the
Anthropocene. Even though my confoundment came from encountering the combination
of historical violence, human labor, and environmental growth that characterizes the
American northeastern landscape, the concern about the relationship between the
nonhuman world and human efforts to master it is not only geographically ubiquitous (at
least within European societies), but also as ancient as at least Hesiod’s Works and Days,
the farmer’s almanac written around 700 BC. As the guest editors of this issue of our
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journal remind us, though, it is in Virgil’s Georgics that the anxiety over human activities
of cultivation and construction as repeatedly threatened to be overrun or swept away by
the life of the more-than-human world finds its classic culmination and the beginning of a
literary mode. Interestingly, Virgil is also often considered one of the classic fathers of the
mode that is allegedly antithetical to the georgic, i.e. the pastoral (with the Eclogues):
while the former regards nature in terms of necessary labor, the latter usually describes
human/nonhuman relationships in a state of harmonious idleness. Yet, both modes – in
their classic form as well in their historic revivals—can be also read as the two-fold
reaction toward a change in the material (economic, technological, political) relationships
between a certain community and its surrounding environment, a change that inevitably
concerns the future of this relationship, who is the position of mastering it, and what such
mastery would entail. From this perspective, the georgic can indeed be part of an
“usufructuary ethos” that, as Erin Drew pointed out in his recent eponymous volume,
provides “a framework for determining the best uses of the nonhuman world, not in terms
of what sort of use was most productive, but in terms of what sort of use would best fulfill
the user’s responsibilities to others, both human and nonhuman, in the present and
future” (Drew 2-3). It is thus somehow unsurprising that the georgic has been recently
described by scholars as an alternative not to the pastoral and its reincarnations, but to
anthropocentrism. According to Christopher Loar, the georgic mode does not, in fact,
reflect an ideology of human mastery over the nonhuman world, but focuses instead “its
attention on the way that humans collaborate with nonhuman materials. In the process,
it assembles a social world that includes both human and nonhuman actors” (Loar 242).
Most of the contributions in the Art and Creative Writing section of this issue of
Ecozon@ engage with a similar understanding of the georgic mode. For instance, the cover
image belongs to a series of paintings entitled Postpastoral, by Patti Trimble. Trimble, a
poet and visual artist based in California and Italy, tackles the merging and intersections
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of human-made and natural worlds through works in which the boundaries between the
organic and the artificial are somehow blurred or overlapped. For example, in the cover
image, what appears to be a tablecloth with a neatly symmetric and vegetable-themed
ornamental design is superimposed on a desert landscape in which no order appears to
be recognizable. Similarly, in the painting entitled “Postpastoral #4,” the tension between
the pastoral sense of harmony and the more georgic labor over the land is exemplified by
the contrast between the white lace figure and the green background: while the former is
a common example of human craftsmanship and order, the latter looks like a wild
entanglement of vegetable life. Yet, the holes in the lace allow the green to come forward
and give life to the otherwise aseptic lace, as if environmental energy and human mastery
intersect, creating a jewel-like image, an ecological diplopia in which the two realms
become one.
The poem that opens the second contribution, “Mowing” by Matthew Griffiths,
tackles the issue of human labor and the environment from a perspective of a daily activity
that is considered less artistic than lace making and yet belongs more to our
contemporary imaginary. Here, the technological and the bellicose collide in the image of
the mowers who, nonetheless, are meant to shape the urban landscape according to our
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dreams of harmonic city-dwellings, where the grass exists but it is perfectly manicured.
Griffiths, a poet and literary critic who is also the author of a volume on The New Poetics
of Climate Change, engages with such a georgic tension between who manages the land
and who benefits from it in other poems anthologized in this section of Ecozon@. For
instance, in “Common,” the poet deals with what he calls “the difficulty of / common land,”
and readers are invited to pay attention to the political, social, and environment features
of agricultural practices in a contemporary world drastically altered by climate change.
The next contribution comes from Katharina Maria Kalinowski, a Marie-Curie
fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities in Cologne and at the University
of Kent, where she is pursuing a PhD in English Philology and Creative Writing. In her
experimental poetry, the industrial and technological matter of our everyday life and
labor (tags, roads, chemicals, WiFi) represents the reality of humanity in the
Anthropocene and interacts with a language at the playful edge of symbolic saturation.
The outcome is a series of poems that depicts an original but scattered sense of dwelling
encompassing human and nonhuman actants, a material world—or rather, “a giant
landing strip floating on water,” as she writes in “Home is where the WiFi connects
automatically”—that is at once alien and intimate, ordinary and full of wonders. Through
linguistic labor, Kalinowski thus produces an original eco-georgic poetry that does not
oppose our urban and industrial environment but works through it, perhaps cultivating
such polluted land for the growth of future flowers of evil.
With the next contributor, the poet Jack Thacker, we instead encounter some of
the common topoi of the georgic tradition, what we would expect to find in rural context:
barns, cattle, farmers. Thacker was brought up on a farm in the West Midlands of England
and he has been the writer in residence at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading. It
is thus unsurprising that his work engages often with the ancient relationship between
poetry and agriculture. Yet, the poems anthologized here are neither the celebration of
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human mastery, nor a naïve and nostalgic depiction of “the good old days.” Instead, they
portray the labor of farming, the physical work that pins humans and nonhumans to their
land, to their life, and to their function. Through these poems, writing itself becomes a
material kind of labor: not the abstract work of someone ecologically detached, but a
proper handling—as Thacker’s 2018 debut poetic collection titles—of the material world,
an artisanal effort without illusion about the future and death, but that does not rush,
choosing instead to “work at the pace of hands.”
The two final contributions to this section of Ecozon@ are not directly tied to the
main theme of the issue, but they nonetheless add two fresh perspectives to the question
of literature, labor, and the natural world encoded in the georgic mode. The first one is a
few excerpts from “Seeds,” a long poetry sequence that, as stated by the poet, “thinks
about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass
extinction.” The author, Kim Trainor, is a faculty at Douglas College, where she teaches
classes on poetry, ecopoetics, climate justice, science fiction, and world literature. As a
writer, she published two volumes of poetry, the last of which is entitled Ledi (Book Hug).
As Trainor writes in her introductory statement, the two “seeds” anthologized here
function as blueprints, “whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by
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its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different
way of being in the world.” The last contribution is instead three poems by Rowan Kilduff,
a mountain-runner, writer, activist, photographer, and musician who currently lives in
the Czech Republic. Working within the tradition of American eco-poetry but intersecting
it with Eastern religiosity, Kilduff’s poems bring a spiritual dimension to our encounter
with the nonhuman world as well as a call to be “wildly awake” to that encounter,
somehow embracing it with an affirmative “yes.”
Works Cited
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.
Hill & Wang, 1983.
Drew, Erin. The Husufructuary Ethos. Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long
Eighteenth Century. University of Virginia Press, 2021.
Loar, Christopher. “Georgic Assemblies: James Grainger, John Dyer, and Bruno Latour.”
Philological Quarterly, vol. 97, no. 2, 2018, pp. 241-261
Wessels, Tom. Reading the Forested Landscape. A Natural History of New England.
Countryman Press, 1997.
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Author:Trimble, Patricia Title: Postpastoral
Postpastoral
Patricia Trimble
[email protected]
Postpastoral #2
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Postpastoral #4
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Postpastoral #6
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Author: Griffiths, Matthew Title: Five Neo-Georgics
Five Neo-Georgics
Matthew Griffiths
[email protected]
Mowing
They had waited the winter out, and the week

the clouds cleared they arrived,
blades that chilled under tarpaulins now ready

with the new sun to descend on us.
From the municipal garage they took

to the streets, their undeployed limbs
buzzing with the motors that moved them.

At each verge, each reservation, each park
the mowers lowered their rotors to grass –

the drivers, with silence clamped to their ears,
scanned street through their visors, pulled

spindly levers with canvas-gloved hands,
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crawled across civic green on thick tyres.
The drone of the fleet was heard high
in the town. They sprayed cuttings

inside themselves, but the smell
of chlorophyll’s shrapnel mingled with diesel

to bring tenants onto their balconies.
One vehicle hovered near a fire escape

that rang with the shared vibration, the rise
and fall of mechanical noise as the mower turned.

The yellow bricks glared. Dry leaves,
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caked in gutters by the last rain, broke

and shook as workmen began walking the roofs.
Offset
Now the heavy tread in the balance

Lightens tomorrow’s load
Turns tilt into an
Upward step—
Grassroots grasp the earth they break

Draw down the life of
Sky in which they
Bury blades—
So read the field and tell me how the green

Pricks the sole to
Keep us on
Our toes—
The ground’s collective gesture to horizon

Is a broadcast that discloses coded
Abundance in each
Scaled seed.
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Crown estate
ballot the forest floor

to find red/amber/green accounted for
leaving blue to the levelled sky
all cloud cumulus
each modelled cell contributes
we will raise stakes

for green nimbus, yellow cirrus
furnish air with its waxed replacement
the toy nerves of fresh shade
nightbreathers that haunt low sleep
stock falls, samara money we collect

& broadcast at arms’ length
axes line trunks

for the landscape’s graph
pollarded to plot
the earthed negative
of growth
let them palisade chalk shores

never silhouette for swarms,
spreading hollowed hearts
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for tables
& then cracked hands can gesture

to catch the last of sky
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from Application
Common
and, increasingly, the environment

manorial system, which can
commoners, or between
years ago, but which
has just been implemented
These benefit only the holding
and currently cover only nine English counties
a problem; namely, the difficulty of
common land.
Act, replacing the
need to obtain consent
works include those which prevent or impede
authority, while commoners
Act, however, any person
respects this is good, because it removes
when it can simply say it is open
land. Such land is seen
to try to correct
to apply to remove
applications, where land is removed
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Aeration
too long, but

hot topic—and rightly so as, whether
influenced by previous uses, and these alter
Comparisons can thus be instructive.
estates that are keen to reverse
and from those scores a total is derived for
classification: you cannot alter this, but it has
valued on the scale
Their minimum levels need to be held
the speed at which soils warm
options indicate the investment
tool can be of significant help
applications of phosphorous,
on local and management
intervals, but is
increases that can be achieved
of earthworm biomass
to sequester carbon
the answer, as well as a technique
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Author: Kalinowski, Katharina Maria Title: Poems
Poems
Katharina Maria Kalinowski

University of Cologne, Germany
University of Kent, United Kingdom
[email protected]
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Sölle, Dorothee. “Definitionen des erwachsenseins”. Fliegen lernen. Gedichte. Wolfgang Fietkau
Verlag, 1979. p. 71.
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Author: Thacker, Jack Title: Poems
Poems
Jack Thacker
[email protected]
Nightshift
I follow the beam of torch

across the silent yard. I touch
the outhouse switch: the barn

hangs bright like a lantern.
All the ewes are lying down

content to wait till dawn –
in the candlelight of straw

lamb and mother stir. Before
I sleep, I wander up the road

in the dark without the aid
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of the torch and watch stars
bleed into their full brightness –
I cannot measure their depth

nor detect the turn of the earth.
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Cattle in Rain
The gateway’s a washed out festival site

where cattle sink to hocks –
their knees are caked in clay and shite,
are crusting into rock
and look like the knot of a burr of oak

where the tree’s been cropped
or grown around a wire. They stand stock
still, unmoved, looking up,
waiting for the end. Until they’re co-opted

into the warm barn, where
through the dark of winter they’ll be kept
safe in the knowledge of their
return to grass. A promise made of air.

A promise we’ll break
this time next year. We’ll think it clear
but the outlook is bleak.
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The Ring
Rows of cattle pens –

each one containing the care
and vulnerable life’s work
of a farmer.
First lot in –
the calves are confused by the circular
empty space and the wall
of people looking.
One of the hands –

his tobacco rollie cigarette
a smouldering twig
in his mouth –
taps with a cane

each calf in order.
The auctioneer reads everything –
the quality of a calf,
the slightest expression

on the face of a buyer;
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this one a stranger, this one
he knows well.
The pen is empty.

Time for the auction ring
to move. The auctioneer
gives the order –
each farmer, dealer,

takes hold of the rails
and all the men and women
walk in unison
and the whole

huge rig of galvanised steel
is moved the few meters
to the next pen.
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Out back are stalls –

second-hand books, DVDs, cakes,
and in the middle
an old man
selling watches,
surrounded by trays of cogs and lenses.
He says he can fix
anything that’s dead.
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Lines
Starting from scratch, resting on the surface,

begin your line. Don’t rush, work at the pace
of hands, whispering your words, in touch
with each arc and dip. Don’t think too much.
Let your mind drift – memories of a valley,

footsteps, stories the length of a field. Finally,
turn and look back over what you’ve drawn.
Ask yourself: how curved or straight is my line?
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Author: Trainor, Kim Title: An Excerpt from “Seeds”
An Excerpt from “Seeds”
Kim Trainor
Douglas College, Canada
[email protected]
Poet’s Statement: “Seeds” is a long poetry sequence that thinks about forms of resistance,
survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each ‘seed’ functions
as blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to
adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different way of
being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, “the
beautiful cell,” among others. The Vespa orientalis, for example, as noted by Robert
Bringhurst in Learning to Die, has evolved a band of the obscure pigment Xanthopterin to
draw sunlight out of air and generate a small voltage. The endangered chinook salmon
travel thousands of miles to their spawning grounds in the Fraser river and feed the rich
coastal ecosystem. Tiny houses, mobile wood frame cabins outfitted with solar panels, are
being built by the Tiny House Warriors in unceded Secwepemc Territory in the interior
of BC to challenge the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline. This excerpt consists
of Seed 8, Elysia chlorotica and Seed 19, Gaia.
Seed 8. ELYSIA CHLOROTICA (CHLOROPLAST, ENDOSYMBIONT)
The light reactions, the dark reactions, leaf unfurling, the light—
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eastern emerald Elysia, clade Sacoglossa, Elysia chlorotica
littoral, in the salt marshes, the tidal marshes, small pools and shallow creeks,
leaf unfurling, the light—the pigment chlorophyll absorbs the blues
the reds, the spectral blues, absorb a photon, lose electron flows
to pheophytin to a quinone, flow electrons flow the light reactions.
In the salt marshes of Texas among the blue crabs and the mud crabs.
In the tidal marshes of Nova Scotia. Vanishing. Cryptic green
algal endosymbiont. Seaweed. Sea green. Chloroplasts
sucked out and stitched to tubules like leaf veins.
Shifting genes. Diverticula. Radula. Algal plastids. The lumen,
the lumen. A leaf unfurling. Pale green χλωρός khloros, seagreen, moss and
pickle. Emerald. Pistachio and pesto. Chlorophyll. Love for this.
The light—absorb the blues, absorb a photon, lose electron flow
to phenophytin flow to quinone flow electrons, gathering. Illumined.
A drop of water split. Regain electron. A molecule, dioxygen.
The light reactions, the dark reactions, leaf unfurling, the dark—
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realm of the dead, the fields of bliss, Elysium. The dark

reactions. Flow electrons, chain reactions, break down carbon.
Break down carbon, sweet conversion in the dark and
in the light. Endosymbiont who puts the light together.
χλωρός πλάστης. Chloroplast. The one who forms.
Seed 19. GAIA (BIOSPHERE, THE CARNAL FIELD)
This intertwined web of experience is, of course, the ‘life-world’ to

which Husserl alluded in his final writings, yet now the life-world has
been disclosed as a profoundly carnal field, as this very dimension of
smells and tastes and chirping rhythms warmed by the sun and
shivering with seeds. It is, indeed, nothing other than the biosphere—
the matrix of earthly life in which we ourselves are embedded.
[]
My body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in

others, in the encompassing earth…
—David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
A. sends me a screenshot of Elysia in response to my poem—

So beautiful an ornament to this world and most likely will move
to another soon, an underworld…Robert Macfarlane mentions
the Saami belief that the dead live in an underworld that mirrors
our own..Could our mirror world be populated by extinct creatures?
Yes, I think, how many have gone through. The Elysia unfurls
its wings. Emerald chloroplasts stitch sunlight to carbon. In the salt
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marshes of Texas. The blue crabs. The mud crabs. Stitch calcium.
Form chitin. Chilean tarweed and sea kale. Sea angel. Sea salp.
The chaotic nanostructure of espajitos, little mirrors tangle the light.
Sea kelp. Salal. Stitch carbon to hydrogen. The assembly of
light-gathering machinery. Paper birch. Nootka rose. Western swordfern.
Capture light in narrow wave-length windows. Salmonberry.
Thimbleberry. Release oxygen. The rare bright elements, the soft,
the clear, the blue. Hydrogen joins helium. The fusion ash of stars
seeded through the universe. Calcium. Cobalt. Copper. Carbon.
Stitch carbon to hydrogen. Release oxygen. Dandelions.
Meadowrue. The honeybee. The bumble bee. Sip nectar.
Gather pollen. Spiracles of oxygen. Sweet burn and hover.
Western pasqueflower. Yellow glacier lily. Heathers. Sunlight.
Carbon. The engineers. Make honeypots. Make paper cells. The obscure yellow
pigment xanthopterin of Vespa orientalis. Harvest solar energy. Dig nests.
Dig lily bulbs. Fix nitrates in subalpine meadows. Remember the hum
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of bees in white rhododendrons at Illal. See this tiny snail, Angostopila dominika
in the limestone cliffs of Guangxi, China? See how it fits in the eye
of a sewing needle. Take notes—Carbon (C) is a non-metal which easily links
to itself and other elements. Life is dependent upon the chemical qualities
of carbon. Gaia is an emergent property of interactions among organisms.
Our neuron cells include the basket, the cartwheel, the chandelier, starburst,
spindle, pyramidal, stellate, granule, and double bouquet.
A “back of the envelope calculation” in 1972 estimated our microbiome
outnumbers our own cells by ten to one. This assembly of light-
gathering machinery. Luca, our last universal common ancestor, root
of the tree of life, rooted in metallic darkness. Noctiluca. Sitka
spruce. Dark-eyed junco. Remember the soot-coloured moth at Semaphore,
alight on the page. Write, Cobalt (Co) is a rare, bright, whitish-blue metal,
magnetic, needed for root function. Write, blue thinks itself within me,
I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular moment
of vibrating and filling space known as blue…Blue gentian, penstemon,
stickseed, the blue-eyed grass. The light reactions. Remember the night
before we climbed Desolation? We stood on the dark shore at Lightning Creek.
We stood on the earth, on the Orion arm. We stood in time,
looking into the galactic centre, looking into ourselves, these temporary
sentient forms, bodies of fusion ash and starlight.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human
World. Vintage, 1997.
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Coder, Kim D. “Essential Elements of Tree Health.” www.urban-forestry.com/assets/
documents/Coder_Tree%20Elements%20Pub%20I.pdf. Accessed Jan. 2021.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press,
1969.
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Author: Kilduff, Rowan Title: From “New Songs” and “Camino del Viento”
From "New Songs" and "Camino del Viento"
Rowan Kilduff
Ostrava University, Czechia
[email protected]
continuing the arrow, cloud mantras, to climbers
slide-rasp carabiner fast,

— what are we doing up here?
vertical,
the clouded world
drops away.
(Cloud Mantra 21 times)
Rivers tracing back / so many lifelines.
Rock-lines always moving,
thunder claps my heart,

rain on my face.
The arrow disappears,
in connection with it all.
New songs; We are this arc / Fire songs, sky songs, mountain songs Vol 12, No 2
no sutras needed
we open them all up
repairing hearts for a couple thousand years
now we get to hear
songs of future-bursting-light
no guides here
nothing extra
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so runs the free river
‘’brings us across to the other shore…’’
borders, so-called, and given strength —

so easily transcended
by breath, by spirit;
wild song.
Fire songs, sky songs, mountain songs —
becoming mountain
becoming sky
becoming song
becoming —
the creek
splashes my face
the trail crosses over.
The planet carries us —
I go out to talk to the fire at night,

it whips ‘round to me.
sun energy sounds
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in air — in wood — in earth
brings dreams;
and we look ever to the skies.
fire-stars /
desert flowers, everywhere
The brightest stars,
my tracks.
The bright edge cuts across,
leaves only the sound of wind
pure songs come clearer
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no brighter moment than when

we look right in the eye
of another
horizons where hearts meet
Earth-maker’s lifelines
mountains and rivers,
great thunder ways,
trails, tracks way out behind,
kenshō flashes of our ancestors:
more highways than we could ever need,
this blue star still shining.
new days call
every part of me and you —
we are this arc
as far as we can see,
contains all of us.
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kestrel swoops and swerves back around for another pass,
he’s too fast for them, but they’re so many!
kestrel call wakes me.
I take a breath at dawn
an arrow
let fly by the bow of the sky,
sunrise fires — out on mountaintops.
I hold this fire in my two hands
and it doesn’t burn me —
my heart beats a-blaze,
this, like all the gifts we carry comes without even asking.
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We do the best we can.
For peace, we reach higher.
For peace, we listen.
Sep. ’20
****
(‘’brings us across to the other shore…’’ (/Heart Sutra/); ken: ‘seeing’, shō: ‘nature’ or
‘essence’)
****
I climbed, ‘wildly awake’
I climbed
— the same spruce, the same snow —
where the real wild spirits are said to go
‘You gotta find out where wolves go when they die’,
he called back to me and he went out the door
in a dream that woke me,
and said ‘remember — remember why that woke you.’
remember —
running on, running bright
Wildly awake
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real dreamtime.
life-song in
your bright shining heart,
your bright shining mind.
Full-color desert sky!
Can’t look away, can’t even try
when all the animal spirits come to look you straight in the eye.
‘Light in the eye…’
Yet to learn,
so much to learn.
San Bushmen say you’ve got to wake twice every morning,
once with body, once with heart.
Wake up body!
Wake up heart!
Open up, ways closed for the longest time,
fighting against Spirit.
June 2020
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*****
note:
’’Light in the eye…‘’ Gary Lawless (Caribou Planet, 2015) sent me a poem with the line
‘’when the time is right / the spirit of the wolf returns’’ by email, which fit right with the
dream I’d just had. He surprised me by sending me two books from Maine to here. ”Wildly
awake” is from Tim McNulty, read it that morning (from “Night, Sourdough Mountain
Lookout,” in Ascendance, 2013). He wrote me back from Lost Mountain, with a ‘Yes!’ in
answer to the Bushmen quote. I don’t really remember where I heard that, but maybe.
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Author: McGiffin, Emily Title: David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and
Extinction and Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming
World
Emily McGiffin
University College London, United Kingdom
[email protected]
David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 164 pp.
Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming
World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 211 pp.
On 17 May 2019, The Guardian announced changes to its style guide to “introduce
terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world”
(Carrington). According to Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner, “The phrase ‘climate change’
[…] sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a
catastrophe for humanity.” Henceforth, The Guardian would therefore opt for “climate
emergency, crisis or breakdown” in lieu of “climate change” and instead of “global
warming” would use the term “global heating.” The new language is part of The Guardian’s
ongoing efforts to increase public awareness and understanding of the severity of
anthropogenic climate change, which, in our post-400 ppm world, poses an immediate
threat to the continuance of our own and many other species.
Attention to language and precise wording lies at the heart of many vocations, not
only climate science and journalism but also, of course, poetry. Two recent ecocritical
Vol 12, No 2
books—David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics and Matthew Griffiths’s The New Poetics of
Climate Change—address the intersection of poetry and environmental crisis, exploring
how poetry can enact tensions that both call into question and help concretize the
provocations and complexities of our times.
David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics is a small and weighty book that opens with
a definition and brief discussion of the term “Anthropocene” that, over the past two
decades, has risen to prominence as the term for an era in which our shifting human
identity requires us to “think differently about the poem” (5). As the book’s title suggests,
questions about deep time are central to the Anthropocene, which has profoundly
unsettled human notions of time; while on one hand “our dependence on fossil fuels, rare
earth minerals, and plastics puts us in intimate contact with far-distant pasts,” on the
other, the “ruptures that these dependencies have created—such as changes in
atmospheric, soil, and oceanic chemistry and the depletion of biodiversity—also highlight
our intimate relationship with the very deep future” (6). Farrier argues that the
reconstruction of the earth in service of “our desires and priorities” necessitates adjusting
not only “our perception of deep time,” but also “our relation to it” (7).
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Deep time is a unifying thread throughout the book but forms the central topic of
the first of the book’s three chapters, each of which take up one of three “rubrics for
understanding environmental crisis in the humanities” (8). Chapter one examines the
concept of thick time, here defined as the capacity of the lyric to collapse deep time into a
digestible representation that contains a lively awareness of multiple temporalities. Here
Farrier explores the work of Elizabeth Bishop, whose figurings of slow time and geologic
intimacies have “much to offer […] to a study of Anthropocene poetics,” (23) and Seamus
Heaney’s poetic encounters with geology. The second chapter examines “sacrifice zones,”
specifically the Plantationocene pine plantations of Philip Larkin’s poetry and the “eclectic
mix of registers” in Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam, which probes at plastic’s “volatile, unstable
materiality” (74).
The third and final chapter centres on Donna Haraway’s “more playful and
multispecies-focused Chthulucene” (Farrier 9) which asserts that “cultivating a sense of
kinship with multispecies familiars is the most pressing obligation in an era of
hemorrhaging biodiversity” (89). It explores “a range of literary figures that can provide
us with shapes for thinking about what a poetics of kin-making might look like” (90). Here,
Farrier considers how such familiar literary devices as metaphor, apostrophe, and
citation “can provide frameworks for thinking about an intentional turn toward the
nonhuman life that is also a turn back to the (newly strange) self” (91). Specifically, he
centres on extinction that “perhaps more than any other environmental crisis […] pitches
us into deep time: into awareness of the richness of our inheritance from the deep past,
and the depleted legacy we will leave to the deep future” (92).
These chapters consider both poets familiar to ecocritics and those whose work
has yet to be thoroughly examined from an ecocritical perspective. In all cases, Farrier’s
approach is original, stimulating and highly readable. Perhaps most compelling is the
book’s central argument that poetry means differently as a result of the Anthropocene; in
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these difficult times, meaning must be reconfigured and poetry of all kinds figures
prominently in this process. In enabling “the intrusion of other times and places in the
given moment,” lyric poetry has the capacity “to draw vastly distant temporalities within
the compass of intimate experience” and in doing so can show us that “geologic intimacy
is a condition of being human” (127). At the same time that relationships with deep time
implicate us “in relations of violence,” poets call on us to establish new relationships—
“collaborative rather than exploitative” —with the species around us. The making and
remaking of meaning, Farrier concludes, is central to life, which is itself “an ongoing
process of multispecies poeisis” (128).
Like Farrier, Matthew Griffiths contends that the climatic instability of our
contemporary world—and the questions it raises and civilizational uncertainty that it
portends—not only demands new approaches to poetry, but also highlights a new role for
poetry in helping us grapple with uncertainty and change. The book focuses on the poetic
genre it deems most suited to the task, i.e., Modernist poetry of the early- to mid-twentieth
century, and in particular the works of Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Basil Bunting and
David Jones. These poets all lived through a period of profound social and artistic
upheaval, and their strategies for making sense of change “make them distinctively
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valuable to the comprehension of climate change” (30). Griffiths argues that several
particular features of Modernist poetry, particularly “ironies of representation and a
resistance to received ideas of ‘Nature’; transnational or global scales; hybridization of
natural change with cultural and social…change…; a new problematics of environmental
selfhood; [and] language’s vexed attempt to engage with the world and, reflexively, with
its own materialism” (30) make it particularly suited to our troubled times.
While chapters one through five offer insightful discussions on the Modernist poets
under consideration, I felt that New Poetics truly finds its stride in its final chapter, “The
Poems of Our Climate Change,” which is dedicated to poems produced since the
emergence of climate science that take up climate change as their central concern. To
highlight one example, Griffiths touches on the series of twenty-one poems on climate
change, overseen by then-UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, “that appeared on the
Guardian’s website in the months leading up to COP21” (158). Griffiths is critical of this
and similar poetic projects that directly address climate change; in “making available
audio of the poems as read by well-known actors, with the option of viewing the text next
to portraits of the performers” and choosing “established contemporary poets” he notes
that “the project is mainstream in its aim” and is “largely more conventional than
experimental as a result.” Instead, he favours contemporary poets that follow in the
Modernist vein of “refusing to be absolute or definitive” and instead articulating the
“uncertainty” that accompanies the climate crisis (154).
The poetry in the vein emphasized in New Poetics opens important avenues for
grappling with humanity’s place in an unstable and increasingly unpredictable world in
which the boundary between nature and culture must increasingly be called into
question. New Poetics makes an important contribution in this regard. At the same time,
the book’s insistence on the value of experimental, unconventional and challenging
Modernist poetry to the exclusion of other literary forms—including those with broad
Vol 12, No 2
popular appeal—is not always convincing. For example, the book opens with a lengthy
critique of Andrew Motion’s climate poem “The Sorcerer’s Mirror” commissioned as part
of the Guardian’s 10:10 Climate Change series. The poem is criticized for its “outdated”
and “pastoralist” aesthetic, which allegedly is insufficient to unsettle received notions of
the environment and our place in it. Apart from this questionable claim (other scholars
have argued that lyric poetry plays a similar role to that ascribed solely to Modernist
poetry in this volume), I couldn’t help feeling that Motion’s poem was unfairly
represented in the critiques of it that surfaced throughout the book. Contrary to implying
that “‘getting outside’ would only work if we could go to the calving face of the [arctic] ice
itself” as Griffiths claims (4), Motion makes clear that the arctic ice and other climate-
damaged landscapes are symbolically present in his small, flooded corner of London:
Already my patch of lawn
is awash, and when I look from my shelter down
to the stippled surface, it opens like the miraculous
O of a sorcerer's mirror. Here are the rising tides
overflowing their slack estuaries and river basins,
the Arctic shore, Shanghai, Florida and Alaska.
Here are the baffled species taking to high ground,
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World
the already famously lonely polar bear and caribou. (Motion; my emphasis)
Through the “sorcerer’s mirror” of his lawn, Motion sees the global calamity and sense of
human responsibility that both extend from and affect his backyard (and by extension our
own) which is not removed from world events but is very much part of them. While
repeated critiques of Motion’s occupy considerable space in the book, the other climate
poems in the Guardian’s 10:10 series—including those by literary heavyweights Kathleen
Jamie, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald, and Carol Rumens—aren’t mentioned in New
Poetics at all.
As Farrier argues, “the environmental crisis is also a crisis of meaning” (4). The
Guardian’s conscientious discussion of its choice of terms makes clear that how we
articulate the environmental crises of our times, how we make meaning of them through
language, is fundamentally important. Language can clarify or obfuscate humanity’s
shifting relationship with the world around us and the gravity of our current situation. As
both Farrier and Griffiths agree, the climate and environmental breakdown of the
Anthropocene require us to revisit the very ways in which we make meaning, including
our understanding of what poetry is and what it does. Importantly, regardless of how we
think about or frame them, contemporary environmental crises are not merely ideas, they
are material realities with devastating consequences for life on our planet. As these books
make clear, how we talk about the Anthropocene matters. What we do about it matters
even more.
Works Cited
Carrington, Damien. “Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the
environment,” The Guardian, 17 May 2019, www.theguardian.com/environment/
2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-
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environment.
Motion, Andrew. ‘The Sorcerer’s Mirror by Andrew Motion,’ The Guardian, 26 September
2009, www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/sep/26/the-sorcers-mirror-andrew-
motion.
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Author: Strass-Senol, Hanna Title: Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, editors.
Ecocriticism of the Global South
Hanna Strass-Senol
Rachel Carson Center, Germany
[email protected]
Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, editors. Ecocriticism of the
Global South (London: Lexington Books, 2015), viii+272 pp.
Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015) is a timely and multifaceted contribution to

the rapidly growing field of the environmental humanities and provides a necessary and
relevant intervention into international ecocritical discourse. It stands out among other,
more widely circulated essay collections that focus on ecocritical practices beyond the
North American context by including voices from, rather than about, the Global South.
Aware of the discursive baggage of the term “Global South,” the editors redefine it along
its emancipatory and geopolitical quality and stress its potential to encompass the
“manywheres” of global economic and political imbalances. Although their argument fails
to address the common criticism of obscuring historical specificities by lumping diverse
geographies together, using the term Global South convinces as the pragmatic solution for
collecting the volume’s wide range of essays.
The second volume of two (with the collection Ecoambiguity, Community, and
Development: Toward a Politicized Ecocriticism, 2014), the present collection comprises
fifteen essays, each exploring unique localised practices and modes of expression of the
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intersections of culture and nature. Including works by junior scholars as well as
established ecocritics from the USA, Belize, Ireland, Cameroon, South Africa, Iran,
Pakistan, India, China, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, the collection presents a wide variety
of ecocritical approaches and perspectives, applied to contemporary and canonical texts
alike, and covering a broad geographical range. Doing justice to fifteen very diverse
chapters on only six pages is undoubtedly hard and so the collection’s introduction
provides very concise and, at times, cursory summaries of the individual essays. Instead
of repeating a sequential summary for each of the contributions, I organised this review
according to the essays’ thematic foci and theoretical approaches. This was challenging
due to the diversity of topics, reading methods and primary texts genres. Nonetheless, I
would like to suggest the following four broad topical and/or methodological clusters:
The first cluster comprises essays that underscore indigenous epistemologies in
their primary texts. Most compelling in this section is Dawson’s “Wai tangi, Waters of
Grief, wai ora, Waters of Life” (Ch. 5). As the only contribution that looks beyond literary
texts, Dawson’s case study of the Whanganui River traces the indigenous struggle that
lead to the river officially attaining legal personality status, turning indigenous
representatives into key figures in river management. It powerfully shows how the
inclusion of indigenous knowledge into New Zealand’s resource (river) management
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policies can be considered a successful form of restitution. In “Literary Isomorphism and

the Malayan and Caribbean Archipelagos” (Ch. 4), De Shield debates productive
differences between Malayan nusanterism and Caribbean tidalectics, while criticising
comparative postcolonial reading practices’ reduction of geographic complexities and
appropriation of the indigenous for ideological ends. El Dessouky’s “Fish, Coconut, and
Ocean People” (Ch. 6) looks at cyclicality as a form of healing in Pacific narratives about
nuclear industrialization. Narrative and cyclicality are both seen as rooting the indigenous
person in place and expediting healing. Another essay that stresses situated indigenous
knowledge is Blend’s “Intimate Kinships” (Ch. 7). Like Dessouky’s, Blend’s analysis
emphasises the role of people’s connectedness with the land in Native American women’s
writing and the relevance of spirituality, indigeneity, and history to indigenous
environmentalism. Blend’s concluding notion of a universal bond between women “both
North and South” (129) seems more wishful than concretely emergent from the texts.
The second cluster combines essays criticising global capitalism. Here, Deckard’s
exploratory essay “The Land Was Wounded” (Ch. 2), which positions itself clearly in the
tradition of Marxist literary criticism, stands out for its thorough literary analysis.
Deckard argues that the regime of 19th-century plantation ecology stretches into
contemporary times and structures the ecologies of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009).
Consequently, the motif of the plantation becomes a ubiquitous theme and aesthetic
structuring principle in Sri Lankan literature of the 1990s and 2000s, fictionalising the
simultaneous hauntings of capitalist exploitation and the civil war. Flannery employs a
similar perspective on Irish colonial history in “Decline and Fall” (Ch. 10). After providing
a brief but useful history of the Irish ‘big house’ novel that relates it to Irish Gothic,
Flannery highlights the historical and ecological dimensions of themes such as land use,
inheritance, class conflict and economic disparity from a Marxist ecocritical perspective.
While the Gothic aesthetic of the novels is linked conclusively to the capitalist
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transformation of cultures and their environments, her analysis is less persuasive for
missing a concrete ecological dimension. Zhou, in “Scenes from the Global South in China”
(Ch. 3), links environmental justice concerns, like a safe work environment, to
globalization and the world market. Through close readings, Zhou deconstructs how
Southern Chinese migrant workers’ environmental justice poetry makes visible the
exploitation, marginalisation, and plight of industrial migrant workers in China’s large-
scale factory complexes, along with the concurrent social, cultural, and environmental
degradation they experience. She highlights especially gendered forms of exploitation and
emphasises the potential of writing as a form of resistance that gives (female) migrant
workers agency. Yaqoob’s “Environmental Consciousness in Contemporary Pakistani
Fiction” (Ch. 15) is a survey of environmentally oriented themes in six 21st century
Pakistani novels. These novels’ criticism of the adverse effects of modernisation,
industrialisation, urbanisation, and the degradation of natural surroundings and
resources is stronger when linking these to global capitalism and its detrimental
environmental effects. Noting that these novels challenge Pakistan’s grand narrative of
progress, Yaqoob suggests that they can be read as “a site of resistance against
imperialistic policies of globalized commerce and industry” (261).
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The third thematic area comprises essays that scrutinise notions of modernity and
their relation to the environment. In “Ecocriticism, Globalized Cities, and African
Narrative, with a Focus on K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents” (Ch. 13), Vital suggests urban
ecocriticism can be a multidisciplinary method to read African literary texts that
represent urban reality while at the same time pointing to the risks of disavowing the
interconnectedness of humans and the natural world. Exploring the narratives’
expression of the ecosocial life of modern urban centres allows Vital to carve out their
imaginative, ethical, and political power. Kane’s “Redefining Modernity in Latin American
Fiction” (Ch. 8) is one of two essays along with Zhou’s, that look at non-English language
texts. Employing a deep ecology approach, Kane reads what he terms the “Latin American
environmental novel” (135) as a counter discourse to hegemonic modernity,
development discourses and neo-colonial globalisation. His two case studies use the
metaphor of addiction (to foreign capital) to criticize an ecologically devastating North-
South-dynamic. Simultaneously, the texts also manage to redefine modernity in
specifically local and sustainable terms. Parsapoor’s innovative “Environmental and
Cultural Entropy in Bozorg Alavi’s ‘Gilemard’” (Ch. 14) analyses a famous Iranian short
story that engages with environmental and cultural changes tied to, in this case, Iran’s
modernisation and industrialisation. While she rejects a simple reading of rising chaos in
nature as mimetic of growing social disorder, Parsapoor nevertheless suggests that
natural and social entropy go hand in hand in Bozorg’s text. By highlighting how the
narrative envisions the mutual relationship between nature and society, her ecocritical
approach provides a new perspective to the commonly socio-political criticism of the text.
The last cluster comprises contributions that focus on the postcolonial quality of
the primary texts. In “The Environmentalism of The Hungry Tide” (Ch. 1), Kumar provides
a close reading of Amitav Ghosh’s novel that aims to consolidate first wave ecocriticism’s
focus on place with postcolonial ecocriticism’s emphasis on the effects of displacement
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and slow violence. Kumar’s claim that the novel is specifically ecocentric because the
landscape becomes a central character in Ghosh’s text, however, is not fully convincing.
Rather, the narrative’s “ecocentric ethical orientation” (22) becomes obvious in how it
presents the tension between local communities, whose livelihoods depend on the
Sundarbans’ flora and fauna, and foreign conservation initiatives. In his contribution
“Northern Ireland <-> Global South” (Ch. 9), McElroy posits Northern Ireland “as Ireland’s
real Global South” (152). Connecting Ireland’s environmental history to its colonial
experience, McElroy diagnoses a sectarian division of approaches to nature and the
environment between a Protestant colonial class and a native Catholic population. This
becomes visible in Irish poetry. Northern Protestant poets tend not to write about the
country’s partition and present Northern Ireland’s environment ahistorically. In contrast,
Catholic poets thematise the eco-colonial history of the North and thereby tie the Catholic
Northern experience to environmental experiences in the Global South. With “Landscape
and Animal Tragedy in Nsahlai Nsambu Athanasius’s The Buffalo Rider” (Ch. 11), Nchoujie
contributes an essay about literary production in Cameroon. The chapter discusses a text
that raises awareness for habitat and species loss, both phenomena tied to the country’s
postcolonial experience. Although parts of the essay seem to essentialize historic animism
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and somewhat romanticise the pre-colonial relationship between animals and humans
(184), the essay closes with a valuable call to action and for the revival of indigenous
knowledge. Olaoluwa’s “Ecocriticism beyond Animist Intimations in Things Fall Apart”
(Ch. 12) offers a new perspective on Achebe’s classical text, diverging from the common
appreciation for Achebe’s representation of traditional animist beliefs and practices.
Instead, Olaoluwa includes Christian ideologies to disclose the text’s ecocritical values,
which are largely tied to eco-social justice.
Undoubtedly, fifteen essays cannot present a comprehensive overview of
ecocriticism from the Global South. However, the volume’s remarkable achievement is
displaying the broad range of themes, foci, and approaches that constitute ecocritical
practice of the Global South. Providing a platform for practitioners from all over the world,
the editors surely succeed in making previously unheard voices heard.
Vol 12, No 2
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Author: Filipova, Lenka Title: Angela Roothaan, Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature:
Negotiating the Environment
Lenka Filipova
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
[email protected]
Angela Roothaan, Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature: Negotiating

the Environment (London and New York: Routledge 2019), 180 pp.
Recently, ecocriticism has witnessed a growing number of publications that strive

to accommodate the diversity of epistemological claims on the environment made by
different communities across the globe. To name a few examples, Elisabeth DeLoughrey
et al.’s Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities (2015), Scott Slovic et al.’s
Ecocriticism from the Global South (2015), and, more recently, Stuart Cooke’s and Peter
Denney’s Transcultural Ecocriticism (2021) bring together global literary and, more
broadly, cultural perspectives by intersecting the discourse of environmental studies with
postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives. Angela Roothaan’s study Indigenous, Modern
and Postcolonial relations to Nature: Negotiating the Environment contributes to this body
of scholarship by filling a gap in ecocritical literature as it aims to create an international
philosophical framework to negotiate different environmental epistemologies. By
considering Indigenous relations to the natural world as they are expressed in
shamanistic and spirit ontologies, Roothaan takes different ways of living on this earth to
the level of a politics of epistemology, uncovering in the process the inherently political
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nature of Western philosophy and science and their exclusive materialist and empiricist
claim to knowledge production.
From the outset, Roothaan states that it is not her aim to devise “a single
generalized ‘shamanistic’ or ‘indigenous’ worldview or way of life” which would
romantically counter the “evil of modernity” (15). Instead, she seeks to investigate where
these ‘spirited’ realities and the realities of modernity clash, with respect to both their
historical and existential situatedness. The first chapter points out that spirit ontologies
are historical and locally varying ways of relating to the natural world, foregrounding the
diversity of Indigenous perspectives from across the globe. At the same time, however, it
also refuses a singular idea of ‘modernity’ by emphasising that rejection of spirits from
the Western history of ideas has been contested by a variety of Western thinkers.
In this respect, chapter two looks at the work of anthropologists who have
challenged modernism from within by inventing ways of reversing the ancient vs. modern
dualism and adopting non-dualistic approaches to the natural world. Eduardo Kohn’s
work, for example, is presented as “a process of reconstruction that does not necessarily
aim at a ‘true’ representation of ‘animist’ ways of being in the world” (34). Still, Roothaan
contends that the work of Kohn and other thinkers, such as Val Plumwood, for example,
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is inevitably limited by the untranslatability of discourses articulating different ways of

being in the world and by reducing Indigenous ontologies to “functional analyses of
material life” (36). The true challenge, according to her, involves taking seriously the
possibility that shamanistic practices express a set of relations to the world that entail
criticism of modernist dualism.
The third chapter examines how the modern demarcation of scientific rationalism
was accompanied by an exclusion of spirits from Western epistemology. It provides a
discussion of Immanuel Kant’s critique of Emanuel Swedenborg’s work in which
Swedenborg dealt with realities excluded from the empirical worldview. Kant’s
epistemology is shown to have emerged from the banishment of a spirit ontology. Though
Kantian morality is commonly considered ‘autonomous’, that is free from ‘natural’
impulses, Roothaan points out that in his writing, Kant embraced the idea of free will, even
though “theoretical reason cannot accept such a thing to exist in the world as science
knows it” (58). However, while morality was saved in this way within the confines of the
rational, it was detached from the spiritual and enabled the suppression of beings that it
declared to be not fully reasonable or human.
Chapters four and five shift the focus to Western thinkers who became frustrated
by the limits imposed upon knowledge by Kantian rationalism. William James, Carl-
Gustav Jung and Jacques Derrida are discussed with respect to how their approaches to
epistemology enable an opening up of Western thought to a return of the spiritual.
Scholars of postcolonial and critical animal studies will be familiar with most of the terms
introduced in chapter five as it is concerned with how these approaches problematise the
othering of animals and the way they overlap with the animalistic nature of human beings.
Roothaan points out that the predominant focus on continental philosophy in the West
explains why the recent attempts to accommodate shamanism philosophically in Western
academic discourse have come from anthropologists of the ontological turn rather than
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philosophers by training who have been confined by the straitjacket of the philosophical
canon. The work of Stephen Muecke also comes to mind here, particularly his Ancient &
Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (2004), in which he attempted to create
the possibility of an academic field of Australian Indigenous philosophy. As he more
recently stated elsewhere, “one of the reasons why the door to departments of philosophy
has remained closed is that the dominant philosophical tradition is analytic”
(“Indigenous” 3).
Examples of spirited approaches to the natural world in the context of postcolonial
economy and politics are at the heart of the last three chapters. Chapter six discusses
Placide Tempels’s work Bantu Philosophy (1956), considered to have set the ground for
the ontological turn in anthropology. Roothaan explains that Tempels approached the
experience of the spirited world of people in Congo without dehumanizing them by
changing the framework of and ‘Africanizing’ both theology and philosophy, treating
different systems of thought as epistemologically equal. Chapters seven and eight address
the clash between global nature conservation policies and local, embodied relations to the
environment. Roothaan proposes an approach to different epistemologies that
foregrounds knowledge as perspectival and adopts the condition of possibility based on
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relation and life-enhancement, as well as what matters in a particular situation, rather

than the Kantian condition derived from causality, space and time.
Through its recurrent critiques of what Bruno Latour calls modernist practices of
“purification” (Never 10), as well as its emphasis on epistemological pluralism, the book
shows that countering the exclusion of spirits and questioning the definition of the human
and the non-human go hand-in-hand in raising awareness of what precludes truly open
intercultural communication in philosophy across the world. Though Roothaan presents
an understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ primarily in terms of critiques of racism in modern
philosophy (Césaire, Fanon and Said), it is also extended to a critique of technologically-
driven philosophy, as well as ‘othering’ of Indigenous knowledge in academia and beyond.
In this context, Indigenous approaches to the natural world and Indigeneity more broadly
are understood as embracing spirited realities, providing a different sense of the human
to the one articulated by the majority of Western philosophical discourse. Even though
Roothaan emphasizes that there is a great variety of Indigenous approaches to the world,
her approach is necessarily limited by a somewhat generalized treatment of ‘nature’ and
Indigenous philosophies, foregrounding notions of ‘spirits’ and the human and the non-
human. As such, it does not examine how ‘Indigeneity’ reframes and rearticulates other
relevant notions such as those of place, space, belonging and movement. Despite this
drawback, the study is an engaging and complex exploration of the current
epistemological claims on the natural world, pointing out that the Western philosophy
and science are but one way of dealing with life and death.
Works Cited
Cooke, Stuart and Peter Denney, editors. Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and
Decolonial Perspectives. Bloomsbury, 2021.
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DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, et al., editors. Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities.
Routledge, 2015.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard UP, 1993.
Muecke, Stephen. Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy. U of New
South Wales P, 2004.
---. “Australian Indigenous Philosophy”. Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 13, no. 2,
2011, pp. 1-7. Accessed 14 Feb 2021. docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1741&context=clcweb
Slovic, Scott, et al., editors. Ecocriticism from the Global South. Lexington Books, 2015.
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Author: Russo, Raffaele Title: Ayesha Mukherjee, editor. A Cultural History of Famine: Food Security and the
Environment in India and Britain
Raffaele Russo
University of Innsbruck, Austria
[email protected]
Ayesha Mukherjee, editor. A Cultural History of Famine: Food Security and the Environment
in India and Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 227pp.
Ancient Rome, dawn of the republican age. A group of emaciated citizens, enraged
and desperate from hunger, heads towards the Capitol. Violent plans take shape.
Nevertheless, just then, the starving citizens meet Senator Menenius Agrippa, who
manages to coax and placate them with ambiguous words, exonerating the Roman
authorities of all responsibility, and laying the blame for the famine not on the politics of
the Senate, but on the unfathomable and inclement (gods-made) climatic conditions:
For your wants,
Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them
Against the Roman state (Shakespeare 215)
Senator Agrippa tempts the rioters, with a story that he defines as a bit stale: an
apologue of the relationship between the stomach and other parts of the body. If the
confrontation had actually taken place in ancient Rome, the story would probably have
seemed quite original. However, due to the circumstances in which this text was staged
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for the first time, it was undoubtedly true that the public had already heard it many times,
as the author (William Shakespeare) ironically reported. In fact, the passage is taken from
Coriolanus, one of the Shakespearean Roman tragedies, written when the Midland Risings,
caused by the enclosures and scarcity of 1607, had recently quelled. This typical
connection between ideology and climatically extreme events is discussed in one of the
essays presented in this complex and interdisciplinary collection: Julie Hudson (“Are we
performing dearth or is dearth performing us?”, pp. 185-198) analyzes the works of
Shakespeare that deal with the theme of famine (in particular Coriolanus), and the way in
which these works were represented in the subsequent theatrical history. The theme of
hunger in Shakespeare is explored by Hudson in ecocritical terms, conveying the idea that
famine and dearth are epiphanic moments, moments which make it dramatically clear
that the environment is internal to human beings and shapes everything they do.
This approach is recurrent in this collection of essays, edited by Ayesha Mukherjee.
The subject here is food security in England and India, with a special, but not exclusive,
focus on the period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The literary
sources examined in the book range from Shakespeare's plays that describe situations of
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famine to the analysis of books written by and for mid-twentieth-century British farmers,
up to the comparative analysis of Bengali novels on the theme of famine. Alongside these
analyses, we also find interesting essays on environmental history and economic history,
also referring to both the English and Indian contexts. The volume is characterized by
frequent internal references (explicit and implicit) between one essay and another. This
aspect of the book sometimes gives the impression of reading a collection of essays by a
single author with an unusually extensive and diversified background, and not a
compilation of essays by several authors belonging to different specialist areas.
In many contexts, a book on the topic of food security, written from such an openly
historical-humanistic perspective, can be considered surprising. It can be expected that a
controversial issue such as political ecology (food security) will be pertinent to an
ecological scientific approach, or perhaps to a sociological or purely economic one.
However, the point of many of the analyses presented in this collection is that the
processes that make us define a given situation as famine, or dearth, as well as the
processes that determine the emergence of subsistence crises, are both extremely
complex cultural phenomena. Surely, they often have a close relationship with unusual
climatic events (of the kind evoked by Agrippa while trying to appease his Shakespearean
crowd). Nevertheless, climate is usually not sufficient to explain the rise and the
worsening of the subsistence crises that can lead to severe conditions of famine, and to
millions of deaths (such as happened in Bengal starting in 1787). Most often, climatic
reasons, if considered on their own, can serve no more than as excellent alibis. They can
hide the political and social reasons, which caused similar climatic events to have a highly
diversified impact in adjacent territories, but with different socio-political outcomes.
A further surprising aspect of this collection of essays is the subject’s peculiar
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carving: why India and England together? The eerie connection between periods of
scarcity and famine in these two distant countries is precisely one of the themes analyzed
from several perspectives in some of these essays. Mukherjee had already considered the
late-Elizabethan representation of dearth and hunger in the English context, as well as the
socio-economic reasons that underpin them, in her book Penury into Plenty: Dearth and
the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (2014). However, in Cultural History of
Famine England and India are linked from the very beginning. In the first pages of her
introduction, Mukherjee provides a table that accurately illustrates the repeated and
troubling parallels of the subsistence crises in the two countries, at the beginning of the
modern age. Even more disturbing is the sudden interruption of the series in England in
the mid-eighteenth century. Disturbing, if we consider that, in the same years, the series
continued without significant changes in India, up to the devastating Bengal famine of
1787–1793.
The temptation to justify the first part of this series with a climatic explanation is
strong. This theory experienced a period of great popularity a few years ago, after the
publication of Parker's seminal book, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe
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in the Seventeenth Century (2013) on the global effects of climate change and Little Ice Age
(LIA) on seventeenth-century politics. Parker's theses are explicitly discussed in some
essays in this book, and they are not entirely rejected. Damodaran, Hamilton and Allan,
the authors of the essay “Climate Signals, environment and livelihoods in the long
seventeenth-century India” (pp. 52-70), after careful analysis, only ask for supplemental
investigation, a greater and more significant collection of data, especially for the eastern
part of the thesis. They only contend that, in the current state of research, the climatic
theory does not function as an adequate explanatory tool to understand the developments
of Indian history in the period in question. In fact, at that time in India there were no
relevant political upheavals, in correspondence to the negative peaks of the LIA or at least
the levels of conflict were not too different from what is usual in that area.
The impression one gets from reading these analyses is that the theories which
provide climatic causes to explain Indian famines are contested also for political reasons.
In Shakespeare's Rome, as in the country administered by the East India Company, or in
the England of the Stuarts, blaming the climate is one way of exempting rulers from their
responsibilities. These responsibilities usually began long before the crisis, for example
with the interruption or sabotage of the networks of mutual aid, at a local and district
level, which had often allowed the inhabitants —both in England and in India—to cope
with subsistence crises. In all these cases, supply and demand do not reconcile because,
in adverse climatic situations, the structures of economic and social privilege distinctly
emerge. The problem is less a question of supply than entitlement (Amartya Sen's theory
of entitlement is a frequent reference in many essays of this anthology): "Starvation is the
characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of
there being not enough to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one
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of many possible causes" (Sen 1).
Ultimately, the fact that the subsistence crises ceased altogether in eighteenth-
century imperial and industrial England while continuing at the same time in India, is
better explained by the colonial asymmetry between the two countries than by a sudden
improvement in the British weather.
Works cited
Mukherjee, Ayesha. Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early
Modern. Routledge, 2014.
Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth
Century. Yale UP, 2013.
Sen, Amartya. Poverty and Famine: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford UP,
1981.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works,
Bloomsbury, 2011.
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Author:Völker, Oliver Title: Simone Schröder, The Nature Essay. Ecocritical Explorations
Oliver Völker
Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany
[email protected]
Simone Schröder, The Nature Essay. Ecocritical Explorations (Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi,
2019) 230pp.
In the last years, ecocritical debates have been increasingly focused on the
question of how literary representations of nature are shaped by aspects of genre,
narrative, and poetological form. Against the backdrop of this fruitful debate, Simone
Schröder’s monograph gives a detailed account of the nature essay and its historical
development from the late eighteenth century to the current surge in ecologically
oriented essay writing. She makes a convincing argument for the nature essay as a distinct
subgenre of nature writing that has not received the appropriate amount of critical
attention. Benefiting from a well-informed comparative perspective, Schröder
acknowledges the importance of European literature, especially the sometimes
overlooked tradition of German nature writing, and thereby analyses a broader and more
heterogeneous body of texts than the canon of North-American literature that is often
considered synonymous with nature writing.
Alongside this wide perspective on different literary traditions and languages, the
particular strength of the study lies in its ability to analyse the close connection between
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formal literary features and heightened attentiveness to the phenomena and processes of
nonhuman nature. Tracing its origins back to Montaigne, the essay is characterized as an
open, digressive, and reflexive form of writing in which the process of personal reflection
and the formation of thought is more important than its possible result. Instead of
providing a totalizing worldview, the position of the writer is constantly questioned and
destabilized. As a hybrid and flexible genre that lies between objective knowledge and
subjective reflection, the essay is able to incorporate and mediate different materials,
perceptions, and ways of meaning-making. This mobility of thought and the ensuing
nonlinear temporality, Schröder argues, is of central importance with regard to the nature
essay’s main topic. Freed from the narrative drive of the novel, the requirements of a
linear plot, and coherent characters, the essay writer is able to widen their attention,
bringing the phenomena and processes of nature into play: “Liberated from the
necessities of story-telling, essayists are more likely to turn their attention fully towards
the natural world” (22).
Having elaborated on this structural argument in the first chapter, The Nature
Essay and Genre, the main part of the study is divided into three systematic chapters, each
of which examines a different aspect in the history of the nature essay. In reference to
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Author:Völker, Oliver Title: Simone Schröder, The Nature Essay. Ecocritical Explorations
Foucault’s archaeological classification of historical a prioris of knowledge systems, these

are termed epistemes. The first part in this three-part structure, the encyclopaedic-
scientific episteme, highlights the ambiguous role of empirical knowledge in the essay and
focuses on authors such as Alexander von Humboldt, Henry David Thoreau, Ernst Jünger,
and David Foster Wallace. Here, the scientific approach towards the understanding of
natural phenomena becomes manifest in encyclopaedic narrative forms. Detailed and
extensive descriptions, taxonomic lists, or enumerations work as the linguistic
counterpart for practices and institutions of ordering and collecting. At the same time,
Schröder argues, these textual attempts of organisation and mapping are never definite
and maintain a certain playfulness. In fact, the inclusion of empirical data often enough
leads to such an abundance of information that, instead of giving clear definitions and
providing for a distant worldview, creates moments of disorientation and ambiguity. The
second part, the metaphysical-spiritual episteme, focuses on personal encounters with
the natural world, especially with animals, which are stylized as epiphanies and intense
moments of revelation. In the texts of Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, and J.A.
Baker the engagement with forms of nonhuman nature is pictured as a process of personal
transformation that oftentimes takes on a spiritual or religious meaning. Finally, and
under the heading of “the ethical episteme”, the last and shortest part considers the essay
as a form of open ethical reflection with regard to normative ecological questions such as
animal welfare. Furthermore, this chapter analyses influential narrative patterns in
ecological discourses, such as stories of natural decline. Taken together, the three
chapters provide a clear and detailed set of concepts for the analysis of the nature essay.
One of the main qualities of the study lies in its close attention to formal aspects
and its ability to link the distinct poetics and aesthetics of the essay with an increased
awareness towards nonhuman phenomena. At times, however, the concentration on this
particular form of writing could in fact have profited from a broader perspective. In
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particular, the possible interrelationship between the essay and other literary
representations of nature, such as in the novel or in poetry, remains unclear. Formal
features that Schröder attributes to the essay, such as the disregard for linear plots, the
open dynamics of association, and the inclusion of encyclopaedic writing, extensive
descriptions and lists, can be found in literary texts as well. Therefore the examples she
considers appear at times a bit isolated from their historical context. For instance, the
chapter on Alexander v. Humboldt could have profited from a comparison with
contemporary shifts in literary representations of nature in e.g. Adalbert Stifter’s work. In
a similar manner, it is not evident why Robert Musil’s short narrative The Flypaper [Das
Fliegenpapier] is included as an essay and not a fictional text. While this does not mean
that the categorizations suggested by Schröder are less useful, it could mean that some of
the aesthetic characteristics of the nature essay are actually those of literary texts with a
strong propensity towards nature. All in all, however, The Nature Essay is a strong
contribution to current ecocritical debates, covering a vast terrain, extremely well
researched and giving careful attention to the interrelation between aesthetic and
narrative aspects and natural phenomena.
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Author: Shahwan, Sara Title: Lorraine Kerslake, The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children:
Correcting Culture’s Error
Sara Shahwan
University of London, United Kingdom
[email protected]
Lorraine Kerslake, The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children: Correcting
Culture’s Error (Routledge, 2018), 192 pp.
Surprising as it may sound, this is the first book entirely dedicated to Ted Hughes
as a children’s writer. Over the past few decades, limited scholarly attention has been paid
to Hughes’s work for young people in both areas of children’s literature and ecocritical
studies. Now is the right time to revisit Hughes’s children’s writing; the context of a world
that has lost its balance is ever so relevant today as environmental degradation intersects
with the rapid digitalisation of human interactions. There is the common concern about
the decline of children’s outdoor activity in urban areas and the consequent alienation
from the natural world. Such “extinction of experience,” to use Robert Pyle’s term, has a
devastating impact on children’s wellbeing as well as their attitudes towards the
environment. Lorraine Kerslake’s The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children
can therefore be read as a response to the urgent call for reconnecting children (and
adults) with nature, based on Hughes’s conviction that “Every new child is nature’s chance
to correct culture’s error” (Winter Pollen 149). It is a timely study that raises questions
about the role of children’s literature in relation to the environmental crisis, crediting
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Hughes’s legacy with the power to revive what Rachel Carson calls a “sense of wonder”
towards the environment.
Kerslake’s in-depth discussion of a representative selection of Hughes’s writing for
children unravels the healing agenda that runs through his whole body of work. In the
introduction, Kerslake puts forward a two-fold notion of Hughes’s healing quest: one
related to his own fractured self and the other to the wider ecological crisis. This frame
clarifies her choice of dividing the book into two parts that appear to be of complementary
importance. The parts titled “Speaking through the Voice of Nature” and “Correcting
Culture’s Error” directly refer to Hughes’s vision of his poetry. It takes root in the natural
world and aims “to direct readers (listeners) towards certain faculties – inner
concentration, inner listening and dependence on the spontaneous mind rather than on
the calculating and remembering mind” as Hughes writes in a letter to Lissa Paul (Letters
483).
With the aid of such letters and other archival material, Kerslake elaborately
elucidates how Hughes’s personal healing quest informed his ecopoetics. It seems difficult
for Kerslake to separate Hughes’s biography from his creative work, especially in the light
of Timothy Clark’s definition of ecopoetry which she quotes: “a space of subjective
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redefinition and rediscovery through encounters with the non-human” (Clark 139). Many
scholars have attempted to study Hughes’s work through the lens of his personal
experiences, most notably Neil Roberts’s Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (2006) and recently
Yvonne Reddick’s Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (2017). Kerslake’s book,
however, sheds light on Hughes’s ‘inner self that was often masked in his writing for
adults’ but revealed and embodied in his children’s writing (1). Accordingly, she reads
“Orpheus” (1971) and Ffangs (1986) as the most “redemptive” of all his children’s plays
and stories in dealing with his own traumatic experience.
Kerslake sets out to trace Hughes’s sense of ecological healing through his
children’s writing and work, bringing to the fore Hughes as an eco-educator. The
transition from Hughes’s biographical background to the detailed readings of children’s
works goes through “Hughes’s cauldron of ideas” about childhood and education. The
close examination of his handbook Poetry in the Making (1967) and the “Myth and
Education” essays (1970, 1976) highlights the therapeutic power of the creative process.
Kerslake makes invaluable links between his critical and imaginative writings, clearly
articulating Hughes’s philosophy of holistic education which emphasizes the role of
imagination in reuniting our inner and outer worlds.
How could the rift between the two worlds be healed in the realm of children’s
literature? To answer this question, Kerslake follows the strands of the healing quest as
manifested in the development of Hughes’s own environmental consciousness across the
different genres of drama, poetry and prose. Within the parameters of “ecodrama,”
Kerslake shows how environmental ethics is developed alongside his play characters
through which he criticises the dualities of science/education and culture/nature. Yet it
is in his packed poetic oeuvre that Hughes takes the healing quest a step further by
reconnecting those binaries set up in his plays. Kerslake argues that Hughes’s children’s
poetry is “where the connection between the human/animal is perhaps clearest and
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where the adult/child reader can also be reconnected” (131). The tracing of animal
representations along the course of his children’s collections suggests the role of the
ecopoet in redefining the human-animal relationship, recovering the reader’s “sense of
wonder,” and raising ecological awareness. As change becomes urgently needed,
narratives like The Iron Man (1968) and The Iron Woman (1993) voice an active sense of
environmental responsibility related to pollution. In her ecocritical reading, Kerslake
makes a compelling point about the complex connection between the psychological, the
social and the ecological in Hughes’s healing quest.
This broad exploration of Hughes’s children’s writing suggests an accessible route
to recover our lost sense of wonder through the appreciation of nature and imagination.
It opens up new areas of enquiry for scholars interested in Hughes studies, children’s
literary criticism, environmental humanities and education alike. While the therapeutic
effect for Hughes has been magnified, the developmental impact of Hughes’s work on
children is yet to be examined in sufficient depth and detail. To find out how young
readers engage with and interpret Hughes’s voice, it might be useful to ground discussions
about his children’s literature in some kind of empirical research. Hughes’s
educational/environmental projects also present an important area for further research;
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they provide blueprints for reforms in education as discussed by Kerslake in a subsequent

paper (2020) that is worth adding to the book. Kerslake’s The Voice of Nature is a
reference to which one will return again and again for its insights into Hughes’s children’s
work and environmental education.
Works Cited
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge
Kerslake, Lorraine. “Ted Hughes: The Importance of Fostering Creative Writing as
Environmental Education.” Children’s Literature in Education, 2020.
https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10583- 020- 09427-4.
Hughes, Ted. The Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber,
2007.
---. Winter Pollen. Faber & Faber, 1994.
Pyle, Robert M. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. Houghton Mifflin,
1993.
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Emily McGiffin
University College London, United Kingdom
[email protected]
David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 164 pp.
Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming
World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 211 pp.
On 17 May 2019, The Guardian announced changes to its style guide to “introduce
terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world”
(Carrington). According to Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner, “The phrase ‘climate change’
[…] sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a
catastrophe for humanity.” Henceforth, The Guardian would therefore opt for “climate
emergency, crisis or breakdown” in lieu of “climate change” and instead of “global
warming” would use the term “global heating.” The new language is part of The Guardian’s
ongoing efforts to increase public awareness and understanding of the severity of
anthropogenic climate change, which, in our post-400 ppm world, poses an immediate
threat to the continuance of our own and many other species.
Attention to language and precise wording lies at the heart of many vocations, not
only climate science and journalism but also, of course, poetry. Two recent ecocritical
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books—David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics and Matthew Griffiths’s The New Poetics of
Climate Change—address the intersection of poetry and environmental crisis, exploring
how poetry can enact tensions that both call into question and help concretize the
provocations and complexities of our times.
David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics is a small and weighty book that opens with
a definition and brief discussion of the term “Anthropocene” that, over the past two
decades, has risen to prominence as the term for an era in which our shifting human
identity requires us to “think differently about the poem” (5). As the book’s title suggests,
questions about deep time are central to the Anthropocene, which has profoundly
unsettled human notions of time; while on one hand “our dependence on fossil fuels, rare
earth minerals, and plastics puts us in intimate contact with far-distant pasts,” on the
other, the “ruptures that these dependencies have created—such as changes in
atmospheric, soil, and oceanic chemistry and the depletion of biodiversity—also highlight
our intimate relationship with the very deep future” (6). Farrier argues that the
reconstruction of the earth in service of “our desires and priorities” necessitates adjusting
not only “our perception of deep time,” but also “our relation to it” (7).
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Deep time is a unifying thread throughout the book but forms the central topic of
the first of the book’s three chapters, each of which take up one of three “rubrics for
understanding environmental crisis in the humanities” (8). Chapter one examines the
concept of thick time, here defined as the capacity of the lyric to collapse deep time into a
digestible representation that contains a lively awareness of multiple temporalities. Here
Farrier explores the work of Elizabeth Bishop, whose figurings of slow time and geologic
intimacies have “much to offer […] to a study of Anthropocene poetics,” (23) and Seamus
Heaney’s poetic encounters with geology. The second chapter examines “sacrifice zones,”
specifically the Plantationocene pine plantations of Philip Larkin’s poetry and the “eclectic
mix of registers” in Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam, which probes at plastic’s “volatile, unstable
materiality” (74).
The third and final chapter centres on Donna Haraway’s “more playful and
multispecies-focused Chthulucene” (Farrier 9) which asserts that “cultivating a sense of
kinship with multispecies familiars is the most pressing obligation in an era of
hemorrhaging biodiversity” (89). It explores “a range of literary figures that can provide
us with shapes for thinking about what a poetics of kin-making might look like” (90). Here,
Farrier considers how such familiar literary devices as metaphor, apostrophe, and
citation “can provide frameworks for thinking about an intentional turn toward the
nonhuman life that is also a turn back to the (newly strange) self” (91). Specifically, he
centres on extinction that “perhaps more than any other environmental crisis […] pitches
us into deep time: into awareness of the richness of our inheritance from the deep past,
and the depleted legacy we will leave to the deep future” (92).
These chapters consider both poets familiar to ecocritics and those whose work
has yet to be thoroughly examined from an ecocritical perspective. In all cases, Farrier’s
approach is original, stimulating and highly readable. Perhaps most compelling is the
book’s central argument that poetry means differently as a result of the Anthropocene; in
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these difficult times, meaning must be reconfigured and poetry of all kinds figures
prominently in this process. In enabling “the intrusion of other times and places in the
given moment,” lyric poetry has the capacity “to draw vastly distant temporalities within
the compass of intimate experience” and in doing so can show us that “geologic intimacy
is a condition of being human” (127). At the same time that relationships with deep time
implicate us “in relations of violence,” poets call on us to establish new relationships—
“collaborative rather than exploitative” —with the species around us. The making and
remaking of meaning, Farrier concludes, is central to life, which is itself “an ongoing
process of multispecies poeisis” (128).
Like Farrier, Matthew Griffiths contends that the climatic instability of our
contemporary world—and the questions it raises and civilizational uncertainty that it
portends—not only demands new approaches to poetry, but also highlights a new role for
poetry in helping us grapple with uncertainty and change. The book focuses on the poetic
genre it deems most suited to the task, i.e., Modernist poetry of the early- to mid-twentieth
century, and in particular the works of Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Basil Bunting and
David Jones. These poets all lived through a period of profound social and artistic
upheaval, and their strategies for making sense of change “make them distinctively
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valuable to the comprehension of climate change” (30). Griffiths argues that several
particular features of Modernist poetry, particularly “ironies of representation and a
resistance to received ideas of ‘Nature’; transnational or global scales; hybridization of
natural change with cultural and social…change…; a new problematics of environmental
selfhood; [and] language’s vexed attempt to engage with the world and, reflexively, with
its own materialism” (30) make it particularly suited to our troubled times.
While chapters one through five offer insightful discussions on the Modernist poets
under consideration, I felt that New Poetics truly finds its stride in its final chapter, “The
Poems of Our Climate Change,” which is dedicated to poems produced since the
emergence of climate science that take up climate change as their central concern. To
highlight one example, Griffiths touches on the series of twenty-one poems on climate
change, overseen by then-UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, “that appeared on the
Guardian’s website in the months leading up to COP21” (158). Griffiths is critical of this
and similar poetic projects that directly address climate change; in “making available
audio of the poems as read by well-known actors, with the option of viewing the text next
to portraits of the performers” and choosing “established contemporary poets” he notes
that “the project is mainstream in its aim” and is “largely more conventional than
experimental as a result.” Instead, he favours contemporary poets that follow in the
Modernist vein of “refusing to be absolute or definitive” and instead articulating the
“uncertainty” that accompanies the climate crisis (154).
The poetry in the vein emphasized in New Poetics opens important avenues for
grappling with humanity’s place in an unstable and increasingly unpredictable world in
which the boundary between nature and culture must increasingly be called into
question. New Poetics makes an important contribution in this regard. At the same time,
the book’s insistence on the value of experimental, unconventional and challenging
Modernist poetry to the exclusion of other literary forms—including those with broad
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popular appeal—is not always convincing. For example, the book opens with a lengthy
critique of Andrew Motion’s climate poem “The Sorcerer’s Mirror” commissioned as part
of the Guardian’s 10:10 Climate Change series. The poem is criticized for its “outdated”
and “pastoralist” aesthetic, which allegedly is insufficient to unsettle received notions of
the environment and our place in it. Apart from this questionable claim (other scholars
have argued that lyric poetry plays a similar role to that ascribed solely to Modernist
poetry in this volume), I couldn’t help feeling that Motion’s poem was unfairly
represented in the critiques of it that surfaced throughout the book. Contrary to implying
that “‘getting outside’ would only work if we could go to the calving face of the [arctic] ice
itself” as Griffiths claims (4), Motion makes clear that the arctic ice and other climate-
damaged landscapes are symbolically present in his small, flooded corner of London:
Already my patch of lawn
is awash, and when I look from my shelter down
to the stippled surface, it opens like the miraculous
O of a sorcerer's mirror. Here are the rising tides
overflowing their slack estuaries and river basins,
the Arctic shore, Shanghai, Florida and Alaska.
Here are the baffled species taking to high ground,
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the already famously lonely polar bear and caribou. (Motion; my emphasis)
Through the “sorcerer’s mirror” of his lawn, Motion sees the global calamity and sense of
human responsibility that both extend from and affect his backyard (and by extension our
own) which is not removed from world events but is very much part of them. While
repeated critiques of Motion’s occupy considerable space in the book, the other climate
poems in the Guardian’s 10:10 series—including those by literary heavyweights Kathleen
Jamie, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald, and Carol Rumens—aren’t mentioned in New
Poetics at all.
As Farrier argues, “the environmental crisis is also a crisis of meaning” (4). The
Guardian’s conscientious discussion of its choice of terms makes clear that how we
articulate the environmental crises of our times, how we make meaning of them through
language, is fundamentally important. Language can clarify or obfuscate humanity’s
shifting relationship with the world around us and the gravity of our current situation. As
both Farrier and Griffiths agree, the climate and environmental breakdown of the
Anthropocene require us to revisit the very ways in which we make meaning, including
our understanding of what poetry is and what it does. Importantly, regardless of how we
think about or frame them, contemporary environmental crises are not merely ideas, they
are material realities with devastating consequences for life on our planet. As these books
make clear, how we talk about the Anthropocene matters. What we do about it matters
even more.
Works Cited
Carrington, Damien. “Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the
environment,” The Guardian, 17 May 2019, www.theguardian.com/environment/
2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-
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environment.
Motion, Andrew. ‘The Sorcerer’s Mirror by Andrew Motion,’ The Guardian, 26 September
2009, www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/sep/26/the-sorcers-mirror-andrew-
motion.
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Author: Ribó, Ignasi Title: Timo Maran, Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies
Ignasi Ribó
Mae Fah Luang University, Thailand
[email protected]
Timo Maran, Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2020), 70 pp.
Stemming from the work of Peirce and Saussure in the early 20th century, the
modern discipline of semiotics, or the “doctrine of signs,” has always been on the fringes
of literary criticism and theory. Cultural semioticians like Charles Morris, Juri Lotman,
Algirdas Julien Greimas, Umberto Eco, and others, were often engaged in research that
was central to the development of structuralist and poststructuralist theory, while at the
same time being sidelined from the broader debates that these developments inspired
throughout the humanities and the social sciences. Something similar happened after
semioticians, under the guidance of Thomas Sebeok, widened their scope beyond human
symbolic meaning-making and began to study all the different signs and sign systems
found in nature. Since then, new fields of semiotic research, such as zoosemiotics,
biosemiotics, phytosemiotics, and so on, have been advancing far-reaching ideas and
concepts, which have nonetheless remained marginal to the general conversation in the
environmental humanities, and particularly within the field of ecocriticism. This book by
Timo Maran, a short—alas, too short!—introduction to the key contributions and insights
Vol 12, No 2
of ecosemiotics, might well correct this ostracism and help to put semiotic research back
at the center of environmental criticism and theory.
A Professor of Ecosemiotics and Environmental Humanities at the University of
Tartu, the author is no outsider to this conversation. It is perhaps no exaggeration to
describe the small Estonian city of Tartu as the spiritual, or at least intellectual, home of
semiotics. It was in this same university that Jakob von Uexküll carried out most of his
research on the Umwelten of nonhuman animals, one of the foundations of modern
biosemiotics. And it was also here, right after the Second World War, that Juri Lotman and
his colleagues developed what came to be known as the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural
semiotics. The Department of Semiotics in Tartu, led in turn by Igor Černov, Peeter Torop,
and Kalevi Kull, has continued this tradition, establishing itself as the foremost research
center for cultural semiotics and biosemiotics in Europe. Having worked during the best
part of his academic career in such an environment, where he carried out pathbreaking
research on the semiotics of mimicry and played an active role as editor and contributor
to some of the most significant publications in zoosemiotics of the past decades, Timo
Maran became the head of the Department of Semiotics in 2018 and is now one of the
leading advocates for a wider and more inclusive form of ecosemiotics.
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Author: Ribó, Ignasi Title: Timo Maran, Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies
This book, which is part of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in
Environmental Humanities, co-edited by Maran himself, is an attempt to present in the
most synthetic but also comprehensive way the foundations, scope, and ambition of
current research in ecosemiotics. This transdisciplinary field is defined at the outset as
the “branch of semiotics [that] emerged in the mid 1990s to scrutinize semiosic or sign-
mediated aspects of ecology (including relations between human culture and
ecosystems)” (Maran 1). The book is divided into three main sections. The first section
lays out the foundations of ecosemiotics, by outlining some of the key contributions that
have allowed semioticians to conceive ecosystems as complex interactions between
organisms which are bound, not just by exchanges of matter and energy, but also of
meaningful signs. The second section develops the implications of this semiotic
understanding of ecosystems for the analysis of the problematic relations between human
culture and nonhuman nature. The argument is further elaborated in the final section of
the book, where Modelling Systems Theory (MST) is used to advance an original
interpretation of the forest ecosystem, as one possible ground for the semiotic modelling
of what posthumanists would call the culturenature continuum.
As a synthesis of some of the key ideas that have emerged in the past few years in
the field, including contributions by the author himself, the book is clear and accessible,
not assuming any familiarity with semiotic scholarship on the part of the reader.
Throughout the book, there is a constant effort to bring semiotic tools and concepts, which
elsewhere are often articulated in a parochial and technical manner, beyond the confines
of semiotics, highlighting their relevance for researchers working in other areas of the
environmental humanities, and most especially in literary ecocriticism. In a book so brief,
however, such an ecumenical ambition means that many of the ideas brought up are
treated somewhat superficially, without engaging in the kind of close discussion that
semioticians or other scholars familiar with semiotic literature might appreciate.
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In sum, this book is a good place to gain a first and up-to-date understanding of the
field, which is no doubt the purpose of the series where it is published. Leaving aside its
value as an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics, the aspect of the book that might be
more appealing to ecocritics is perhaps its ethical ambition. Throughout its pages runs an
optimistic undertone, the conviction that the looming ecological catastrophe brought
about by the progressive distancing of humans from their environment is not inevitable.
Maran recognizes that the “causes for this Anthropocenic condition are largely semiotic—
based on our striving toward symbolic hegemony and preference of closed semiotic
systems” (59). But he also believes that there is a semiotic path that could allow us to
overcome the nature/culture dualism and by engaging in mutually respectful dialog with
all the other species with whom we share the earth.
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Credits for Ecozon@ Vol. 12 No. 2 (Autumn Issue)
Vol.12, no. 2
Mission Statement
This journal of ecocriticism, founded in 2010, is a joint initiative of GIECO

(Ecocritical Research Group in Spain) and EASLCE (European Association for the Study of
Literature, Culture and Environment) and is published by the University of Alcalá as of
2014. Its principal aim is to further the study, knowledge and public awareness of the
connections and relationship between literature, culture and the environment. As a
virtual space, it provides a site for dialogue between researchers, theorists, creative
writers and artists concerned with and by the environment and its degradation. Its pages
are open to contributions on all literatures and cultures, but its special mission is to reflect
the cultural, linguistic and natural richness and diversity of the European continent.
Contributions, which are subject to double-blind peer review, are accepted in five
languages, in order to increase visibility and broaden the participation of scholars who
are not part of the English-speaking world. Ecozon@ publishes original research articles,
in addition to creative writing, visual arts and book reviews. Publication is open to
scholars interested in ecocriticism from around the world. We recommend membership
of EASLCE to our contributors and readers, but it is not a requirement for either.
Ecozon@ is currently indexed in MLA, OAI, DOAJ, ERIH PLUS, Latindex, Dialnet,
ISOC and EBUAH, the institutional repository of the University of Alcalá.
Editorial Board
Editor in Chief
Vol 11, No 2
Carmen Flys Junquera, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Associate Editor
Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University, USA
Managing Editor
Gala Arias Rubio, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Guest Editors for Special Section Vol. 12, no. 2, 2021
Sue Edney, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Philipp Erchinger, University of Düsseldorf, Germany
Pippa Marland, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Book Review Editor
María Isabel Perez Ramos, University of Oviedo, Spain
Book Review Assistant Editor
Sean Matharoo, University of North Carolina, USA
Creative Writing and Arts Editor
Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College, USA
Secretary
Irene Sanz Alonso, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
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Assistant Editors
Madeleine Hugai, Augsburg University, Germany
Margot Lauwers, University of Perpignan Via Domitia, France
Sofie Schrey, KU Leuven, Belgium
Louise Squire, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Adele Tiengo, University of Milan, Italy
Editorial Assistants
Beatriz Lindo Mañas, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Alejandro Rivero Vadillo, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Graphics Editorial Assistant
Ana Flys Junquera
Advisory Board
Dr. Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas, Arlington, United States

Dr. Franca Anik Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Dr. Hannes Bergthaller, National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan
Dr. Julio Cañero Serrano, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Dr. Margarita Carretero González, Universidad de Granada, Spain
Dr. Juan Carlos Galeano, Florida State University, United States
Dr. Fernando Galván Reula, University of Alcalá, Spain
Dr. Greg Garrard, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
Dr. Catrin Gersdorf, Universität Würzburg, Germany
Dr. Terry Gifford, Universidad de Alicante / Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
Vol 11, No 2
Dr. Axel Goodbody, University of Bath, United Kingdom
Dr. Christa Grewe-Volpp, Universität Mannheim, Germany
Dr. Ursula K. Heise, UCLA, United States
Dr. Isabel Hoving, University of Leiden, Netherlands
Dr. Serenella Iovino, University of Torino, Italy
Dr. Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
Dr. Lorraine Kerslake, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
Dr. Esther Laso y León, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Dr. Timo Maran, University of Tartu, Estonia
Dr. José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Dr. Imelda Martin Junquera, Universidad de León, Spain
Dr. Sylvia Mayer, Universität Bayreuth, Germany
Dr. Juan Ignacio Oliva, University of La Laguna, Spain
Dr. Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe University, Turkey
Dr. Christopher Oscarson, Brigham Young University, United States
Dr. Stephanie Posthumus, McGill University, Canada
Dr. Luis I Prádanos, Miami University, United States
Dr. Roland Racevskis, University of Iowa, United States
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Dr. Catherine (Kate) E. Rigby, Monash University, Australia

Dr. Francisco Sáez de Adana Herrero, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Dr. Catriona Sandilands, York University, Canada
Dr. Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, United States
Dr. Diana Villanueva Romero, Universidad de Extremadura, Spain
Dr. Alexa Weik von Mossner, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Issue published 28 October 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37536/ecozona.2021.12.2
Reviewers for issues 12.1 and 12.2
Dr. Jada Ach, Arizona State University, USA

Dr. Başak Ağın, TED University, Turkey
Dr. Deborah Amberson, University of Florida, USA
Dr. Gala Arias Rubio, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Dr. Joshua Barnett, PennState University, USA
Dr. Roman Bartosch, University of Cologne, Germany
Dr. Katarzyna Olga Beilin, University of Wisconsin, USA
Dr. Dorothee Benkowitz, Pädagogische Hochschule Weingarten, Germany
Dr. Christine Berberich, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom
Dr. Hannes Bergthaller, National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan
Dr. Claudia Deetjen, University of Würzburg, Germany
Vol 11, No 2
Dr. Gabriele Dürbeck, University of Vechta, Germany
Dr. Roger Ebbatson, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Dr. Edmond Chang, Ohio University, USA
Dr. Sue Edney, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Dr. Sule Egya, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria
Dr. Philipp Erchinger, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
Dr. David Fairer, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Dr. Michael Fuchs, University of Graz | University of Oldenburg, Austria
Dr. Wendy Harding, Université Toulouse, France
Dr. Charlotte Haskins, Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe, Germany
Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China
Dr. Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger, Norway
Dr. Joannis Kaliampos, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Dr. Lorraine Kerslake, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
Dr. Tatiana Konrad, Universität Wien, Austria
Dr. Uwe Küchler, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Dr. Julia Kuznetski, University of Tallin, Estonia
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Dr. Jennifer Ladino, University of Idaho, USA

Dr. Montserrat López Mújica, University of Alcalá, Spain
Dr. Christian Ludwig, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Dr. Pippa Marland, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Dr. Alison Martin, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany
Dr. William Major, University of Hartford, USA
Ms. Caitlin McIntyre, SUNY, USA
Dr. María Antonia Mezquita Fernández, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
Dr. Frederike Middelhoff, Goethe Universität, Germany
Dr. Solvejg Nitzke, Technische Uiversität Dresden, Germany
Mr. Kenneth Toah Nsah, Aarhus University, Denmark
Dr. Francisco Páez de la Cadena Tortosa, Universidad de La Rioja, Spain
Dr. John Parham, University of Worcester, United Kingdom
Dr. Catherine (Kate) E. Rigby, Monash University, Australia
Dr. Margaret Ronda, UC Davis, USA
Dr. Jim Scown, Cardiff University, United Kingdom
Dr. Samuel Solnick, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
Dr. Tess Somervell, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Dr. Anna Catherine Stenning, University of Worcester, United Kingdom
Dr. Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University, USA
Dr. Aadrian Tait, United Kingdom
Dr. Diana Villanueva Romero, Universidad de Extremadura, Spain
Copyright Notice
Vol 11, No 2
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the
work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that
allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's
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b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for
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process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater
citation of published work.
Cover image: Postpastoral #2, Patricia Trimble.
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Published by Sponsored by
Institutional Address
Carmen Flys Junquera

Editor in Chief
Instituto Franklin
Colegio de Trinitarios
C/ Trinidad, 1
28801 Alcalá de Henares
Madrid (Spain)
Vol 11, No 2
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Author: Sullivan, Heather I. Title: Editorial 12.

In light of the Anthropocene’s industrial agriculture based on petroleum products,

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“agroecology” as another kind of collaboration that simultaneously enriches humans, the

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Culture: An Introduction (2016), Guanio-Uluru highlights how the player is confronted

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Eco-Georgic: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene

Towards Care: Georgic Ecology

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georgic ecology, is “a symptom of a more fundamental crisis of humanity” (“Where

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Georgics emphasizes variegation and experimentation … promoting ambiguity and

Virgil’s interpretation of his sources results in distortions, falsifications and

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New Georgic / Anthropocene Georgic

It is a moot point, however, as to whether this pragmatic resistance can still be

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the environmentalist movement, the use of DDT [Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane]and

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Submission received 6 October 2021 Revised version accepted 15 October 2021

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Reclaiming The Land, Restoring The Garden?

Keywords: Sackville-West, tradition, labour, T.S. Eliot, modernism.

Palabras clave: Sackville-West, tradición, trabajo, T.S. Eliot, modernismo.

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Back to The Land

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The Tradition of Labour and the Labour of Tradition

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The faith within [the farmer] still derides the pen,

Given her reliance on an agricultural encyclopaedia in composing the poem, it is perhaps

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(“Formidable” 589, Poems 71). Because “[e]verything is tottering”, Eliot is making “a

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“The land and not the waste land”

Alexandra Harris maintains that Sackville West’s “poetic weaponry looks

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Georgics as Anthropocene Aesthetics

Submission received 4 February 2021 Revised version accepted 10 August 2021

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