Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Inspired by Virgil's Georgics, this study conceptualizes Renaissance poetry as a domestic labor.

When is literary production more menial than inspired, more like housework than heroics of the mind? In this revisionist study, Katie Kadue shows that some of the authors we credit with groundbreaking literary feats--including Michel de Montaigne and John Milton--conceived of their writing in surprisingly modest and domestic terms. In contrast to the monumental ambitions associated with the literature of the age, and picking up an undercurrent of Virgil's Georgics, poetic labor of the Renaissance emerges here as often aligned with so-called women's work. Kadue reveals how male authors' engagements with a feminized georgic mode became central to their conceptions of what literature is and could be. This other georgic strain in literature shared the same primary concern as housekeeping: the necessity of constant, almost invisible labor to keep the things of the world intact. Domestic Georgic brings into focus a conception of literary--as well as scholarly and critical--labor not as a striving for originality and fame but as a form of maintenance work that aims at preserving individual and collective life.

Author: Katie Kadue
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 09/20/2021
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.49d
ISBN13: 9780226797496
ISBN10: 022679749X
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | Renaissance
- Literary Criticism | European | General

About the Author
Katie Kadue is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.