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Full Description
The Work of Reform interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in Piers Plowman had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland, culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing. William Rhodes brings together a rich poetic archive with agrarian husbandry manuals, prose polemics, and imperial tracts to connect conflicts over land and labor on the English manor to those of Tudor Ireland, offering a new eco-Marxist literary history of ecological transformation across the medieval-modern divide.
In the aftermath of the Black Death, the depopulation of the countryside, and the beginnings of the Enclosure Movement, English poets imagined enforced labor as a panacea for social unrest precipitated by environmental catastrophe. Arguing that Piers Plowman established how poetry could envision religious and economic transformation based on agrarian production, The Work of Reform reveals that the Piers Plowman tradition's valorization of agrarian toil was open to appropriation by later writers developing totalizing, top-down colonialist projects.
Contents
Introduction: Political Ecology and Literary History from Langland to Spenser
1. Manorial Political Ecology and Passus 6 of Piers Plowman
2. Ecologies of Anti-fraternalism in the Piers Plowman Tradition
3. The Drone and the Sovereign: Labor and Consumption in Mum and the Sothsegger
4. The Political Ecology of Primitive Accumulation in English Reformation Literature
5. Why Colin Clout Came to Ireland: The Piers Plowman Tradition and Spenser's Late Pastorals
6. Colonial Political Ecology and A View of the Present State of Ireland
Conclusion
