Cultivating Peace The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750 / Melissa Schoenberger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schoenberger, Melissa, 1987- author.

Series:

Transits (Bucknell University)

Transits: literature, thought & culture 1650-1850

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Virgil.

Georgica (Virgil).

Peace in literature.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

English poetry--Early modern.

English poetry.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (202 p.) : 5 B-W photos

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021

Place of Publication:

Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

During the decades following the English civil wars, British poets seeking to make sense of lingering political instabilities turned to Virgil's Georgics. This ancient poem betrays deep ambivalences about war, political power, and empire, and such poets as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Anne Finch found in these attitudes valuable ways of responding to the uncertainties of their own time. Composed during a period of brutal conflict in Rome, Virgil's agricultural poem distrusts easy stability, urging its readers to understand that lasting peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Like the ancient poet, who famously depicted a farmer's scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Contents:

Introduction: the arts of peace

Mutability: cycles of war and peace

On mutability: Virgil's first lesson

Before Marvell: Georgic mutability in England

The trap of war and the map of paradise: Marvell's vision of peace

Translation: Virgil and Dryden in 1697

The English Virgil

Dryden's Georgics: "nor when the war is over, is it peace"

From peace to war: the Aeneis

Contingency: the Georgic poetry of Anne Finch

A Virgilian retreat

Finch and the force of fable

Imitation: the Georgics before and after 1713

John Philips and the inmate orchat

From didactic to descriptive

After Thomson: Christopher Smart, the hop-garden, and the end of Georgic peace

Conclusion: "at their hours of preparation."

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781684480494

1684480493

9781684480517

1684480515

OCLC:

1138500429