Georgic Reformations of the Vita Activa: The Nature of Work in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract

This dissertation is an archaeology of a neglected literary mode in England's post-Reformation literature. The georgic mode takes its name from Virgil's poem about agriculture. Unlike pastoral and other forms of nature writing that emphasize otium, recreation, and the distinction between nature and culture (a binary that appears in alternative forms such as country/city, science/politics, and wilderness/civilization), the georgic mode emphasizes the necessity of work in nature, and the mutual imbrication of the human and non-human world. The Protestant Reformation affirmed and worried over the value of labor, work, and action — the hierarchy of human activity that Hannah Arendt calls the vita activa. The troping of all activity as georgic activity is symptomatic of the pressures modernity put on the vita activa. Those pressures are due to several related early modern phenomena: 1) the Protestant Reformation, 2) the development of capitalism and the new professional opportunities it spawned, and 3) the invention of modern political forms, including the nation state, competing modes of parliamentary and monarchical rule, and nation-building through both Old- and New-World imperialism. The first three chapters explore georgic reformations of labor, work, and action through canonical Early Modern texts. Shakespeare's As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, and All's Well That Ends Well use the georgic mode to stage what Arendt calls the rise of the social by grafting private labor to political action. Shakespeare's Sonnets use the georgic mode to evaluate two competing career options – making a living as a playwright in a labor society or aspiring to be an artist ("the only 'worker' left in a laboring society," according to Arendt). The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost dramatize the process by which epic action was transformed from an externally oriented category of public deeds to an inwardly oriented hermeneutic for navigating the fallen world. The fourth chapter explores how the georgic mode structured Early Modern world-making, and authorized colonial appropriation. The afterword considers how the georgic mode survives in current discourses of the Anthropocene, and considers what an active, georgic education might mean for the humanities in the twenty-first century.