Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Low Lands

  • from Part III - Territories
  • Edited by Paddy Bullard, University of Reading
  • Book:
    A History of English Georgic Writing
    Published online:
    01 December 2022
    Print publication:
    15 December 2022, pp 275-295

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that the East Anglian Fens, a 1,500-square-mile diamond of flat, low-lying land given over largely to agriculture, are a perfect test case for thinking about georgic at the level of landscape. An ancient landscape that seems to forbid organic metaphor, the Fens can seem like perpetually un-reclaimed literary ground. Yet since Caryl Churchill’s Fen (1982) and Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) contemporary authors have found a more involving territory there than in more conventionally literary landscapes in the Lakes, the Yorkshire Moors or the Wessex uplands. The history of the Fens places often remote and lonely agricultural lives in a setting shaped by mighty human efforts against huge natural forces, especially those of river and sea. In the fens it is easy for georgic writing to lose its human scale. Here both farmer and writer must make a reckoning with everything that the landscape has excluded.