Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Reading the Earth Workers written by Ethan Mannon and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This project aims to interweave three threads of discourse--literary studies, agriculture (or agricultural ecology), and ecocriticism--in order to address the critical neglect of georgic spaces and authors by exploring (predominantly agricultural) work and labor in twentieth-century American writing. Although Virgil's Eclogues and the pastoral mode it helped create are more familiar and have attracted far more scholarly attention, this dissertation will argue that the georgic mode--and its fountainhead, Virgil's Georgics--functioned as a vital touchstone for a range of twentieth-century writers. After differentiating the pastoral and georgic modes and establishing the importance of agriculture to several formative environmentalist thinkers, this study takes up its main subjects. The authors of twentieth-century georgics selected for Reading the Earth Workers include canonical figures who cloaked their georgic materials with mantels of pastoralism (Robert Frost and, to a lesser degree, Willa Cather) as well as writers whose blatant focus on agriculture has contributed to their marginalization (Louis Bromfield and Wendell Berry). In an effort to outline the full spectrum of georgic materials generated in the twentieth century, this study ignores the boundaries put in place by genre. That is, Reading the Earth Workers acknowledges that the work of georgic writers includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Finally, this dissertation also challenges anthropocentrism by embracing the importance of nonhuman animals to agriculture, the Georgics, and the georgic mode; thus, the final two chapters collect and analyze the discourse regarding two species of laboring animals--namely, the honey bee and the draft horse.