The re-creation of the world: Power, property and globalism in modern pastoral and agrarian fiction of the 18th and 20 th centuries
Abstract
The Re-Creation of the World: Power, Property and Globalism in Modern Pastoral and Agrarian Fiction of the 18th and 20 th Centuries is a study that examines two related genres of literature that emerge in the early modern period in England during the Enlightenment age of "improvement." In this period, common land and small farms were rapidly converted to large estates and plantations. The same process occurred abroad in England's colonies in North America and the Caribbean. This study argues that the literatures of modern pastoral and agrarian fiction became integral modes of expressing the anxieties, desires, and often brutal contradictions of agrarian capitalism in the Atlantic world as it was transformed by British colonialism. These literatures are particularly important to the revolutionary periods of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, which saw, respectively, the creation of democratic republics in the United States, Haiti, and France and decolonization and civil rights movements in England's former colonies. The study is divided into three chapters which have as their focal points the work of Alexander Pope, William Faulkner, and Jamaica Kincaid, three authors representing the three geographical and temporal coordinates that The Re-Creation of the World brings together.
Subject Area
Modern literature|Caribbean literature|American literature|British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Jones, Joshua David, "The re-creation of the world: Power, property and globalism in modern pastoral and agrarian fiction of the 18th and 20 th centuries" (2013). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI3600024.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI3600024
