Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

In this revisionist study, Katie Kadue argues that some of the authors we credit with groundbreaking literary feats conceived of their writing in modest and domestic terms, aligning it with women's work. Male authors' engagements with a feminized georgic mode became central to their conceptions of literature, focusing on the necessity of constant labor to preserve individual and collective life.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 20 September 2021
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

In this groundbreaking revisionist study, Katie Kadue delves into the surprising perspectives of some of the authors widely regarded as groundbreaking literary figures. She reveals that Michel de Montaigne and John Milton, among others, conceived of their writing in remarkably modest and domestic terms. Contrary to the grandiose ambitions often associated with the literature of their era, Kadue uncovers an undercurrent of Virgil's Georgics that portrays poetic labor during the Renaissance as closely linked to what is commonly referred to as women's work. Kadue unveils how male authors' engagements with a feminized georgic mode became integral to their understanding of what literature could be and what it truly is. This other georgic strain in literature shared the same fundamental concern as housekeeping: the relentless, almost invisible labor required to maintain the integrity of the world. Domestic Georgic sheds light on a conception of literary, scholarly, and critical labor that goes beyond the pursuit of originality and fame. Instead, it emerges as a form of maintenance work, aimed at preserving individual and collective life.

Weight: 346g
Dimension: 153 x 229 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226797496